**What they don't tell you is that it has run on nearly zero budget for decades.** I met some of the people that run one of the sites. They use begged/borrowed and "stolen" hardware to keep it running at all and don't do work on it during their paid working hours (as a federal employee). They keep it going because they want to. Archive: https://archive.today/6mGXc From the post: >>The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is discussing plans to eliminate an entire team responsible for publishing and maintaining critical atomic measurement data in the coming weeks, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to reduce the US federal workforce, according to a March 18 email sent to dozens of outside scientists. The data in question underpins advanced scientific research around the world in areas like semiconductor manufacturing and nuclear fusion.