Maybe not the best time to be looking for a physics job

I have been hearing a lot about the big hurt being put on US particle physics because of the recent budget cuts. This particular blog posting, on an excellent public health blog, caught my interest because of the discussion of people taking postdocs overseas. I don’t know what other options I would have found in the US because my current job (in the overseas postdoc category) came up at the beginning of my search.  I’m left a little concerned about what I will find when I do start applying sometime soon.

Not that I had my heart set on moving into high-energy physics, but I am in a closely allied subfield already and the people who are forced to leave the big atom smashers are going to have to work somewhere. That makes positions harder to get throughout physics. Just in case I run out of things to worry about, right?

The conclusion of the post linked above:

Today NIH spending in real terms is at or below what it was before the celebrated “doubling” of the late 90s. We are losing a generation of scientific leaders as postdocs can’t get new grant and mid-career academics coming up for tenure can’t get their grants renewed. That’s in biology and medicine, the kind of research the public ostensibly does care about.

No wonder physics is in bad shape.