The full House Appropriations Committee approved the VA-HUD spending bill on Thursday. According to the press release issued late Thursday, it appears the full committee accepted the cuts in NASA’s budget made by the VA-HUD subcommittee on Tuesday without any changes: the numbers quoted look unchanged from what was announced Tuesday.
On Thursday NASA issued a press release stating that administrator Sean O’Keefe wrote a letter to C. W. Bill Young (R-FL), chairman of the committee, asking him to restore NASA’s budget to the level requested by the President. “As reported, the Subcommittee-recommended funding level for NASA would adversely affect its ongoing science and technology programs, as well as the NASA workforce, and will delay plans for FY 2005 critical technology design efforts needed to better define the architecture in support of the Vision for Space Exploration,” O’Keefe wrote. Interestingly, NASA issued this press release late Thursday, after the committee approved the bill, with the cuts intact.
