Congress, NASA

House appropriations committee to review NASA this week

On the schedule this week for the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee is a hearing on the oversight of NASA and the NSF, featuring the inspectors general of the two agencies. According to The Hill, this hearing is one of “hundreds” planned by House appropriators to look for places to reduce spending. “The goal of the hearings is to help identify top management challenges and find ways to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in these respective departments and agencies,” the chairman of the CJS subcommittee, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), told the paper.

This will be the subcommittee’s first NASA-related hearing in the new Congress, and only the second overall after one Wednesday performing a similar review of the Departments of Commerce and Justice. The subcommittee roster in the new Congress features many veterans of the subcommittee from the previous Congress, with some changes reflecting the change in party control and the departure of former chairman Alan Mollohan:

Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chairman
Jo Bonner (R-AL), Vice-Chair
John Culberson (R-TX)
Robert Aderholt (R-AL)
Steve Austria (R-OH)
Tom Graves (R-GA)
Kevin Yoder (R-KS)
Chaka Fattah (D-PA), Ranking Member
Adam Schiff, (D-CA)
Mike Honda, (D-CA)
José Serrano, (D-NY)

22 comments to House appropriations committee to review NASA this week

  • DCSCA

    Slice and dice. This agency is in serious need of some major ‘House’ cleaning– particularly in management circles.

  • Whatever comes of this, 7 Republicans to 4 Democrats, …

    Rep Wolf in June of last year “”We need a strong American space program,” Wolf said. “I hope we can find a compromise, because we need it.”

    NASA could do worse under a different ideologue in this House. I wish Rep Wolf well on this task and lament Rep Gifford’s name not being among the list to add to this debate.

  • “Welcome NASA folks. Thanks for attending this committee hearing. Now let’s talk about how you are spending the money we intended to send you, but never got around to appropriating….We see nothing has happened…what is wrong with you people!?”

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    Hi. Can someone please explain the term ‘Ranking Member’ and what status such a term conveys?
    Thanks.

  • Jeff Foust

    “Ranking member” is the leading member of the minority party on a committee.

  • Justin Kugler

    My American government professor in college said on the first day of class to think of his course as a lesson in the theater of the absurd. Such theater is what I expect in this hearing.

  • I wonder if C-SPAN will cover any of it.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    Thanks Jeff.

  • Such theater is what I expect in this hearing.

    Expect more of the same most of the year. Eventually the appropriators will have to do their jobs, but not until more partisan hot air is spewed.

  • Justin Kugler wrote:

    My American government professor in college said on the first day of class to think of his course as a lesson in the theater of the absurd. Such theater is what I expect in this hearing.

    My bachelor’s degree is in Political Science. Once I got into the real world of government I found that all that theory stuff was worthless.

    Politics, at best, is all about enlightened self-interest driven by flawed egos. It’s been that way since the nation was founded.

  • amightywind

    My American government professor in college said on the first day of class to think of his course as a lesson in the theater of the absurd.

    You professor is quite a cynic. The theater has it’s purpose. Experience in the private sector tells me that if a technical organisation is not challenged and restructured regularly, inefficiency and rot set in. NASA hasn’t been restructured in decades. The rot is apparent. NASA needs a large budget cut and a clear mission.

  • Justin Kugler

    You’ve just reached entirely the wrong conclusions about how and where NASA needs to be challenged.

  • Space Cadet

    Space Blahger

    “Welcome NASA folks. Thanks for attending this committee hearing. Now let’s talk about how you are spending the money we intended to send you, but never got around to appropriating….We see nothing has happened…what is wrong with you people!?”

    Great comment!

    Sadly, no joke though. I’ve been in just that situation, chewed out for not making progress with funding that hadn’t arrived yet.

  • Michael from Iowa

    NASA’s overarching goals are clear – a new focus on technological development, cooperating with commercial space to facilitate the growth of an American spaceflight industry, and once a suitable replacement for the shuttle is developed reaching out to new destinations, it’s just the details that need to be worked out.

    This is a crucial time for NASA, the last thing they need right now is cuts.

  • Peter Lykke

    @Justin
    Much to my surprise I find that I agree with almightywind here: NASA needs a big cut and a clear mission. And the reason why? Then, and only then will Congress understand that things have to change. The Apollo/Gemini way of operating has to change.
    And sadly, a lot of good people will lose their job. There is nothing to be done about that, I’m afraid.

    But look at it this way: It must be hell working in NASA now. You work your butt off, and all you can hear is people screaming “Pork”!.

    Anything will be better than continue this calamity an extra couple of years.

  • Cut NASA’s budget and give it a mission?
    as opposed to…
    Increase NASA’s budget and give it a mission to develop commerce’s access to LEO and to study earth’s climate?
    ***************
    That line of reasoning ends with cutting NASA and rolling all space dollars into DoD missions, where HSF has no justification. T-Partiest might even fund space-dev at that level.

  • Justin Kugler

    Peter, I do actually agree that a budget cut may be what NASA needs to transform itself and get back out ahead. I just don’t find that at all congruous with amightywind’s stated support for the BFR approach to space exploration.

  • James T

    I’m afraid I have to agree that I would welcome a NASA budget cut, assuming that it would cause the end of the SLS. It really is a rocket to nowhere, without any defined mission beyond ISS crew transportation, which will be available for less by the private sector by the time any HLV could be completed. Focusing on technology development will open doors not available to us now, making the next generation of missions possible. Let’s start doing more with less so we can do much more with more.

    As has been said before… it’s going to be a wild year.

  • NASA Fan

    We’ll see this coming Monday, the 14th, what the President has in store for NASA as that is the date for release of the White House’s 2012 Budget. In addition, watch the FY 2011 CR process for budget cuts as well. Between the two of these budgets, I expect more than HSF is going to get whacked.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Justin Kugler,

    It’s quite simple. Almightywind’s view of NASA is that its only proper function is launching astronauts on BFRs to the Moon and elsewhere. All other projects are ‘non-core’ and should be transferred to the NOAA and others.

  • Space Cadet

    Budget cuts don’t have positive transformative effects on an agency. If anything, they tend to make it more disfunctional rather than less, as the agency generally isn’t allowed to or willing to descope its mission in the same proportion to the budget cuts. They end up promising to do the same job or a tiny bit less with much less resources. The prospect of layoffs causes the loss of the best people in the organization, as everyone in the organization looks for other jobs but only the best are successful in finding them in a difficult job market.

    As an example, see the message some members of the authorization committees sent back to NASA in response to their report on heavy lift, essentially: You don’t get the message, we want you to lie and say you can build X capacity with Y $ on Z schedule. We don’t care if you succeed; we just want to keep the money flowing to our states and districts.

  • Ferris Valyn

    I agree with Space Cadet.

    The way you have a positive effect on an agency is to start by figuring out what you really want that agency to do. Get smart, intellegent, and able leadership, get a realistic budget needed to do so, and then spend the money. Assuming an automatic budget decrease (or increase for that matter) will have a positive effect is expecting to get blood from a stone.

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>