As President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner continue their high-stakes negotiations over tax revenues and spending cuts, officials at Oak Ridge National Laboratory say they have prepared as best they can for automatic spending cuts that could go into effect in January.
“We have been preparing for increased budget pressures for several years now and have taken a number of steps to reduce our costs, including workforce restructuring, benefits changes, reduction in energy consumption, and other operational costs,” ORNL Director Thom Mason said in a statement Monday. “Since we don’t know exactly how any cuts would be allocated by the various governments agencies that fund ORNL, we can’t really say with certainty what the impacts would be, other than to say we are as well-prepared for uncertainty as we can be.”
