Congress, NASA

With a budget in place, House members plan to return to NASA authorization bill

Now that the fiscal year 2014 appropriations bill is all but done, and a two-year budget deal in place as well, the House Science Committee is planning to revisit a controversial NASA authorization bill. Appearing on a public policy panel at the 22rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week outside Washington, Chris Shank, policy director of the committee, said the bipartisan budget deal reached last month is key to moving ahead on the authorization bill. “That budget agreement sets a framework, an environment, which we can now operate under,” he said, adding they would be “pushing forward” later this month and next month on the authorization bill.

Speaking at a Space Transportation Association reception on Capitol Hill last night, committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) confirmed that desire to restart work on the authorization bill, which has been stalled since the bill passed the committee on a party-line vote in July. “I don’t have any explanation why it was partisan. It should not have been,” he said of the July committee vote. “We get a second shot at that now that we’ve solved the sequestration-level funding, so I am hoping we can come up with a more bipartisan bill.”

7 comments to With a budget in place, House members plan to return to NASA authorization bill

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “Chris Shank, policy director of the committee”

    Just what the committee and NASA need, another incompetent under Griffin’s sway writing legislation. Ugh…

  • yg1968

    Jeff, any news on what the Senate will be doing with its own version of this bill?

  • yg1968

    The reason that the vote was partisan in July is because the Democrats didn’t want to use numbers that took into account the sequester. Republicans said that it made no sense to not factor in the sequester. The Budget deal resolves this issue for FY 2014 and FY 2015. Having said that, the House Democrats’ version of the NASA Authorization was even worse than the Republican version. It had even more pork and even more anti-commercial crew and anti SAAs provisions. The Senate version of the bill is much better than either versions that were proposed in the House.

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>