1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

I write to warn you of a serious disaster for the US scientific enterprise. Laying off the NIST Atomic Spectroscopy Group is insane and will cripple many US scientific endeavors, who utterly depend on these accurate physical measurements. These include my own observatory’s research into astrophysics. The measurements cannot be replicated in a university laboratory - the budget would be too big - and they are a force multiplier for uncounted thousands of scientific experiments, including the hugely expensive James Webb Space Telescope. Do NOT CUT THIS VITAL SERVICE!! This is crazy. Get in there and stop DOGE from doing something irreparable - and which will turn all US university physical science researchers into third-rate, begging, ineffectual workers. ACT NOW!