Congressional `pork' projects take funds away from NASA

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - When House and Senate budget negotiators announced a deal on a massive $328 billion federal spending bill, lawmakers proudly noted that they had funded NASA at the amount requested by President Bush in February.

But a closer look at the $15.5 billion bill shows that budget writers axed more than $300 million from NASA's budget request and replaced those dollars with money for line items of their own choosing. Many of them are hometown "pork" projects that win legislators political favor at home but no fans inside the federal agencies they affect.

For example, the proposed budget slices $200 million from the international space station program and $70 million from the Space Launch Initiative, part of NASA's effort to develop a next-generation spacecraft. An additional $20 million came from Project Prometheus, a key element of the agency's hopes of finding a way to convert nuclear energy into electricity for in-space propulsion and power.

In place of those funds, lawmakers stuffed in an assortment of projects, spreading federal dollars across the country.

The U.S. House is supposed to vote on the spending bill Monday. The Senate may take it up this week, although Democrats are threatening to block a vote until January.

Some of these so-called "earmarks," such as a $1.9 million line item for infrastructure repairs at Kennedy Space Center, can't really be called pork. But there is more than $220 million in bacon in the NASA portion of the budget bill.

The projects are as varied as $3 million for an astronomy center in Hawaii and $4.5 million for a new science center at St. Bonaventure University in New York to $3 million for "ocean and weather research" at the University of Alaska - home of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the powerful Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

All of this comes in a year when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration suffered one of its darkest moments, the Feb. 1 loss of the space shuttle Columbia, and when many legislators have openly criticized the space agency's budget as insufficient.

"It shows you that no agency, no program is sacred and is protected from the appropriators," said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks overzealous federal spending.

"We were hoping that unfortunate disaster in February would have been a wake-up call," Williams said. "This is what happens when you move valuable resources away from these programs, when you look at your own political future and your own political needs over needs of a program or an agency."

Sen. Bill Nelson, who has frequently complained that NASA has been starved of funding by the administration and Congress, said the projects may be admirable but should not take precedence over the needs of the agency.

"It's unconscionable that money was taken from a critical project like the space station and siphoned off into independent earmarks - each of which may be very worthwhile, but not when you do it at the expense of not having enough funds for critical, major projects," said Nelson, D-Fla., who does not sit on the appropriations panel.

NASA chief Sean O'Keefe, a longtime staffer on the Senate Appropriations Committee - and a former aide to Stevens - knows the budget process from both sides. He also served as deputy White House budget director in the first year of the Bush administration, before coming to NASA in late 2001.

While O'Keefe would not specifically address the redirected money, he complained about the decision to pare the space station's budget. He said the cut will put a crimp in the station's reserves and leave the project vulnerable to money woes when, inevitably, the unexpected happens.

O'Keefe sounded particularly bitter in noting that NASA did exactly what Congress ordered it to do - get the station's spiraling cost overruns under control - yet lawmakers are now upsetting the balanced ledger that was so hard to achieve.

"Anytime there's an adjustment to the program plan that's presented, that's just not a good thing," he said last week. "That's part of the democratic process. That doesn't mean you have to like it - it is what it is."

Williams noted that earmarks are actually down in the NASA segment of the proposed 2004 budget. In the past several years, earmarks in the NASA budget have skyrocketed - from six projects totaling $74 million in the 1997 fiscal year to $536 million for 132 programs in fiscal year 2002. Such projects accounted for more than $400 million in the 2003 budget, which lawmakers passed in February.

"I guess there's hope," Williams said. "In this case, they're moving down the right road. But I don't want to give them too much credit because they still are taking $200 million out of a budget that really needs all the money it can get for the safety and program issues."

While there are a number of earmarks that cannot be directly linked to a member of the House or Senate committee, most legislators use the coveted positions to send money flowing back to their states or districts.

Last week, while Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has railed against pork in the federal budget, was accusing his colleagues of "spending money like a drunken sailor," Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., was telling a home-state audience about the cash in the NASA bill for Mississippi's Stennis Space Center.

Alaska always does well in the bill - this year's version includes $600,000 for the Challenger School in Kenai, a fishing village of 7,000. The school has a center named for Stevens and his wife, Catherine.

West Virginia, home of Sen. Robert Byrd, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, also gains from NASA's budget. Byrd and U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., scored a number of additions, from extra cash for NASA's Independent Verification & Validation Facility, where the agency vets software, to $200,000 for Wheeling Jesuit University for "Classroom of the Future."

Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, whom Williams called "a very powerful appropriator," and his House colleagues grabbed dollars for their state, from extra money for programs at the Marshall Space Flight Center to $1 million for the Little River Canyon Field School in the southern part of the state.

The earmarks do win lawmakers fans back home. Frank Kinney, executive director of the Technological Research and Development Authority, a Titusville-based governmental agency, is excited at the prospect of $6 million to expand some of its programs.

About $3.5 million will go toward the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program, Kinney said, an 8-year-old service offering free assistance to small businesses through NASA and its contractors. It now is operating in four states, he said - Florida, New York, Texas and New Mexico.

Roughly $2.5 million will go to business incubators in Central Florida and Syracuse, N.Y., Kinney said, including a possible expansion into southern Brevard County.

Kinney credits Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., for the money. Weldon joined the House Appropriations Committee this year, and Kinney said it always helps to have a local congressman making your case on Capitol Hill.

"Dave Weldon has been a strong supporter and a champion," Kinney said.

But Williams, who noted that earmarks are prevalent throughout the spending bill, said the growing practice shows just how much power the agencies have lost in the budgeting process. When lawmakers can tweak each and every expenditure, he said, the agencies are weakened.

"Why have all these people employed at NASA when the appropriators are telling them how to spend their money anyway?" Williams asked. "Their power is going unchecked. They're using money for political purposes and not things that accomplish a mission."

As part of the congressional spending bill, lawmakers say NASA received about $15.5 billion that President Bush requested for the agency. But members of the powerful budget-writing committees slashed money from some NASA requests in order to fund projects that benefit their states or districts. The U.S. House is scheduled to vote on the spending bill Monday. Here are the projects that were cut:

_$200 million from the international space station's reserve fund

_$70 million from the Space Launch Initiative, an ongoing effort to develop new spacecraft

_$20 million from Project Prometheus, NASA's highly touted effort to develop in-space nuclear propulsion and power generation

_$10 million from the Beyond Einstein program, an effort to look at major science questions, such as what powered the big bang

_$8 million from the Space Interferometry Mission, scheduled to launch in 2009 to measure the positions and distances of stars

Total: $319 million

"Frankly this is exactly why our space program is some 30 years behind where it should be."

My best friend and I searched the sky for Sputnik with binoculars back in the '50's - we spotted a moving object in the sky - a point of light moving left to right from our vantage point - and then cringed as Vanguard and other attempts by the US failed to match the effort ( when you can place into orbit a mass you can do unto others on the planet nasty things).

He went on to support the space effort - graft - corruption - arrogance all stood in his way and still does to this day.

Politics is the problem and the curse of mankind - I am a Bucky Fuller advocate - put all the politicians in a space capsule orbiting earth with no communication and life will go on - shut down food processing and millions will starve within a few months - priorities.

Why don't we explore things to improve man on this earth, like food shortage, clean up the enviroment, improve housing and transportation!

Liberal alert! Don't even get me started on this stuff.

food shortage:
Dr. Wambugu developed a disease resistant strain of sweet potato for her native Africa. They won't use it though because the liberal Europeans don't want Africa to have genetically altered food. They want everything grown organic and Dr. Wambugu points out that Africa has always been organic and that is why they are starving.

clean up the environment:
It is the wealth of this country that has allowed us to have an ever increasingly clean environment. Space exploration is the next step in furthering that growth in wealth. But the lefties don't want you to make a profit so we have forests that are burning, destroying habitat, in order to keep lumber companies from making money.

improve housing:
Like smart growth? The restrictions put on development by the left-wing environmentalists has caused affordable housing shortages in every place it has been reimplemented. It is well documented in Carry_Okie's book.

transportation:
More light rail that goes no where and electric cars? How can we recharge our electric cars when the enviros won't let us build power plants? Space exploration would probably give us vast amounts of knowledge that can be used in developing alternative fuel sources.

"What's so critical about the space station?"

Why do people insist on asking this? ISS is what NASA needs to be doing right now. Think about it in the big space picture. People on Earth. Look up. Big space out there. Let's go up. Put a satellite up. Put a man up. etc., etc., until you get to the part where the military motivation is lost once the US has done the moon. Now, you still have people on the Earth who want to go live up there, but you don't have the cash to just go out and do it. What do you do? You figure out the basics of what you'll need in the future when the money comes back, right? So, what hallmark is there about future big space missions and colonies that we haven't learned about through the stuff in the space race? Time. You have to be up there much longer for the stuff that we're gonna do next. So make a Low Earth orbit space station. You can't up it in geosynchronous orbit because it costs to much to put it up there and its further away, making for less pretty pictures.

Besides, why exactly DOES a future mars ship need to dock with a space station? It can't be built up there. You might could rendezvous several parts, but that doesn't need a space station. So it doesn't need a space station so why do we complain that ISS is in the wrong orbit? BTW: I don't think a Mars mission is going to be viable until we've got some moon factories going.

It also is useful to build a station with some other countries if you plan on working with them on future projects. Take Soyuz for example. If that were space station freedom instead of ISS, we wouldn't have 2 guys up there with a Soyuz now would we? Those two non-existent men also wouldn't get Progress resupply ships.

Just because the ISS, as it has turned out to be, is an orbiting hole in which to pour money doesn't make it a bad idea in its essence.

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