As a result of Congressional budget cuts for the 2008 fiscal year, the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) has announced the anticipated layoffs of 225 of its 1,650 employees, in addition to financial cutbacks to some of its programs.

Eighty members of the SLAC staff have voluntarily announced their resignations, according to Lee Lyons, the lab’s director of human resources — leaving almost 150 jobs still to be cut. Lyons said the specifics of the additional layoffs will be announced in February.

In coming months, “the biggest issues will be working with the staff who are laid off,” said Lyons, citing the added need for job counseling for those leaving and group rebuilding for those who remain.

The lab had been expecting to change about 100 positions before the budget cut in order to hire employees with different skill sets for their new project, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), Lyons said. The project will be the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser.

Despite budget cuts, the LCLS remains fully funded and on schedule for a late 2009 opening, according to a SLAC press release.

Other programs were not so lucky. The $550 billion omnibus spending package passed by Congress in December included just $95 million in funding for SLAC — a 20 percent reduction from the $120 million expected by lab leadership.

One experiment known as the B-factory is now set to end in early March, seven months earlier than planned.

Also affected are SLAC’s new photon science institutes, the Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering Center, which designs experiments for the LCLS and studies ultra fast atomic-scale processes, and the X-ray Laboratory for Advanced Materials, which studies the atomic-scale properties of new materials. Both will have plans for growth scaled back as a result of the budget shortfalls, according to the press release.

SLAC is not the only particle physics lab affected by the reduced congressional spending package. The Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia, Ill. faces similar cuts in funding and staff. The cuts will impede progress on that lab’s NOvA neutrino project and development of the International Linear Collider (ILC), a project it shares with SLAC and other international labs.

The project aims to expand the understanding of matter in the universe by building two facing linear accelerators capable of hurling electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, at each other at a rate just shy of the speed of light, according to the ILC Web site. The feat “would take physics to the next level,” Lyons said.

But Congress cut this fiscal year’s funding for the project from an anticipated $60 million to $15 million. Already, three months into the fiscal year, SLAC has spent a quarter of their anticipated budget — what has turned out to be their allotment for the entire year — and had to halt work on the project.

While work will continue on other projects, the impending threat of job loss will weigh on the minds of many.

“I think our biggest challenge over the next couple months,” Lyons said, “will be helping people deal with that uncertainty and anxiety.”