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By KENNETH CHANG

The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the nation’s premier center for plumbing the mysteries of the universe in the tiniest bits of matter, is planning to lay off more than 10 percent of its employees in the coming months, the result of impending budget cuts mandated by the spending bill passed by Congress this week.

Fermilab’s collaboration in an international project to design and build the International Linear Collider, which would slam together electrons and their anti-particles — positrons — at ever-higher energies, will slow to a halt. A Fermilab experiment called NOvA to look for an asymmetry in the laws governing evanescent particles known as neutrinos will be placed in limbo with hopes that it can be revived next year by new financing.

Outside of Fermilab, the spending bill also eliminated the United States’ planned contribution of $160 million to ITER, a test fusion reactor that is intended to lead to commercial energy production by emulating the process that powers the Sun.

Fermilab, in the western suburbs of Chicago, had expected its budget to rise to $372 million from $342 million. Instead it will fall to $320 million. Officials said they were caught unaware by the cuts, and because they affect the 2008 fiscal year that started nearly three months ago, the officials said they had to take action quickly.

“I have never been handed a problem more difficult than this one,” Piermaria Oddone, Fermilab’s director, told his employees at a meeting on Thursday, where he announced that probably 200 layoffs out of a work force of 1,940 people would be necessary.

Remaining employees will effectively have their pay cut. Beginning in February, they will have to take off two unpaid days a month.

Some scientists attributed Fermilab’s woes to Congress’s reviving its practice of earmarks that direct agencies to finance projects that would probably not receive money otherwise. In a statement, the American Physical Society said it “notes with some dismay that had Congress applied the same discipline to earmarking as it did last year, the damage to the science and technology enterprise could have been avoided.”

President Bush is expected to sign the spending bill into law.

In the budget proposed by Mr. Bush in February as well as the versions passed later by the Senate and the House, the Office of Science at the Energy Department was slated for a healthy budget increase of more than 18 percent, part of a promise to double financing for research for the physical sciences over the next decade.

But to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush, Congress rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department and other science agencies. Fermilab’s budget fell, because the spending bill specifically dictates large cuts to the International Linear Collider and the NOvA projects.

Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of Fermilab, said the laboratory had expected to receive $47 million for the collider project, employing about 170 scientists, engineers and technicians. With the final spending bill, that amount was reduced to $15 million. “The money is kind of already spent,” Dr. Kim said.

About $36 million had been allocated for NOvA with about 80 Fermilab people working on that project.