It is more than a decade since the US Department of Energy (DOE) last set out a programme of major new facilities for its network of laboratories. The intention of Ray Orbach, head of the DOE Office of Science, to draw up such a list should be welcomed by researchers.

The DOE is understandably tight-lipped about its plan (see page 357). It has little enough money to support current operations, and there is a very real risk that publishing the list will trigger conflict between the winners and losers. But a list of priorities will soon be needed. With most individual investigators based at universities, the main function of the department's laboratory network is to build and house facilities that the universities themselves could not afford. Such projects take upwards of a decade to plan and construct.

The choices to be made leave many researchers understandably nervous. In the context of frozen budgets — a context that the Office of Science has largely endured since the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 — facilities must be built at the short-term expense of the very people who will use them.

But with no major facility planned since the Spallation Neutron Source, now under construction at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a backlog of potential opportunities is accruing. Orbach is right to bite the bullet and prepare a new plan. It is understandable that he wants to be cautious in discussing its contents, in advance of their approval by his boss, energy secretary Spencer Abraham, and by the bean-counters at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In their different ways, Europe and Japan are also finding it difficult to build large facilities, faced with problems in garnering the necessary support. The fusion project ITER and a linear particle collider (as well as upgrades at CERN's Large Hadron Collider) will be global projects, but there is no consistent framework for these to be considered by the nations that might want to build them. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Global Science Forum remains the most credible body for such discussions, but its influence will need to grow if it is to fulfil this role.

In the meantime, Orbach can draw some encouragement from Congress's recent support for his office (see page 361). Progress seems to have been made in convincing law-makers that the DOE's physics programmes, in particular, are a valuable part of the nation's scientific portfolio. Extra impetus should also come from the gradual expansion of the National Institutes of Health's role in equipping large facilities, such as synchrotron light sources, that are also used by biologists. After a difficult spell, this process is the best opportunity that the DOE has had for years to plan properly for its laboratories' futures.