Yes, they are squeezing as much juice as they can out of the lemon. But there's diminishing returns. It can't continue forever, and the budget will be under inexorable pressure as the scientific returns become increasingly marginal.

This is a problem with science, particularly particle physics: discovering is like mining. Eventually the "ore body" of new phenomena is used up. The period of rapid discovery (up to say the mid 1970s, with a decreasing trickle to 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs Boson) in particle physics will look very atypical and transitory in historical hindsight.

To be honest, you can't know exactly where you are going to find things. I think the rapid discoveries that particle physics were known for within the last centuries maybe are the limits of our current technology. It is not that we lack the ideas, it maybe that we have squeezed the remaining bits of hanging fruits left.

When considering how vacuum tubes were used for a lot of discoveries in physics (nuclear physics in particular) and compare it with the technologies we had to use for things after that you will find a huge gap. Maybe we are pushing the limits of our current technology but the problem is that we don't know. If we know then it wouldn't be research. The only way to find out if something is going to work is at least do R&D work and design a plan and maybe execute it. In the current scheme this is expensive projects. Although if you divide the cost per personnel you will find that it is comparable to other fields.

Lets not talk about how the R&D benefit whole industries because this is a cliche by now (although it is a valid argument in itself). But the only way to advance is to try new things. When people actually say a crisis in particle physics, they usually mean in terms that we did not discover the whole big new thing. But each day we gain more understanding on details of standard model and how interactions work. These things are not sexy enough to be reported by the mainstream media. I post some of these on HN and rarely they get any traction and I get why. It is usually hard to explain and very specialized. But this is not excuse for people to claim that we are not advancing.

That sounds right to me. I don't work in physics, but have many colleagues who have left it for that reason.

~The said, I think Dune still does seem useful. Hard to say whether the cost overruns are a lack of good management or if the experiment is just a quagmire, though. Guess I lean towards the scientists here that it's the former~

EDIT:

Doing some research it seems the Hyper K experiment might just be better, and funding might be better directed there than Fermilab.