nytimes.com

“While it’s great to support other missions,” said Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, who shared that Nobel last year, “it would be disappointing to see the U.S. lose or outsource its own leading role in one of the hottest areas of research.”

For Dr. Riess and his colleagues, this turn of events is another example of a worrying trend in which American scientists, facing budget deficits and political gridlock, have had to pull back from or delay promising projects while teams based in Europe hunt down the long-sought Higgs boson or rocket scientists in China plan a Moon landing in 2025.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, called dark energy “an example of how the U.S. seems to misplay its science hand these days.”

“We predicted and discovered dark energy,” he said. “We have the biggest dark-energy community and the best ground game; we have been designing a space mission since 1998; and now the Europeans will fly it with our minor participation. Something is wrong with this picture.”

This is another one of the things that happen when the “job creators” control a vast majority of the wealth in a country.