Conference Report Highlights
“The conferees are extremely disappointed in the lack of detail provided in the fiscal year 2006 congressional budget justification. NASA is reminded that the primary purpose of budget justifications is to provide needed information to the Committees on Appropriations, and therefore must be submitted in a format with the necessary level of detail required by the Committees so that funding requests may be analyzed.”
“The conferees do not agree to the continuation of the transfer authority in the House bill. However, to the extent necessary, NASA should use the flexibility in spending authority within each of its accounts to accommodate any funding level adjustments after first consulting with the Committees on Appropriations.”
“For fiscal year 2006 and thereafter, the conferees direct NASA to include the out-year budget impacts in all reprogramming requests.”
“As NASA begins the development of programs to return to the Moon, it is critical that it be able to control costs for these, and other, activities. For this purpose, NASA is directed to notify the Committees on Appropriations 30 days prior to allocating funds, modifying contracts, or extending existing contracts that are in excess of 15 percent of the original contract value at the program level.”
“The conference agreement provides $60,000,000 above the budget request for the Aeronautics Research program for a total program level of $912,300,000, of which $25,000,000 is for the continuation of hypersonics research.”
“The conferees have modified Senate language regarding the Discovery program. The conferees set a cap of $425,000,000 on all future Discovery missions beginning with the next announcement of opportunity.”
