The Italian government plans to abolish the Italian National Institute for
Astrophysics INAF because of the economical crisis the world
is facing. The INAF personnel and activities would re-enter in the
National Research Council (almost half of INAF was part of CNR until
2003), which is already funding research in a wide range of subjects (from
law to biology).
The (unclear) savings from such a reform would drastically change the
organization of INAF, who ranked first among the physics
institutes in the last Italian research evaluation CIVR, and of the whole
astrophysics italian community. The consequences on the INAF young researchers on soft money would be dramatic.
Whereas other countries make their best to not cut research, we believe that
this particular italian reform is neither strategic nor efficient.