A salient note about how government austerity works: the Department of Energy labs have decided that as a cost-cutting measure, they will enact a 2-year pay fre

A salient note about how government austerity works: the Department of Energy labs have decided that as a cost-cutting measure, they will enact a 2-year pay freeze for all employees (except the top-level managers who work for Lockheed, not DoE). Hail the great cost-cutting measures! Except the government will still be putting the same amount of money into the labs andyway; we've been getting emails talking about how they're now trying to come up with ways to spend this windfall of excess cash. So far it sounds like they're going to go for some pseudo-green initiative; maybe we'll just get a new Greenification Department, which inspects all of our workspaces and penalizes us when we're not green enough. (This particular pay freeze is because Dr. Chu wants to make Obama look good. Good policy for a Democrat, screw the researchers but keep the $2 million salary for the head of the lab... wait isn't that what Republicans are expected to do?) The talk about an across-the-board 10% cut made me think of that--unless it's specified that employee wages and benefits must not suffer, such a cut will probably just end up boning the minions.