NASA and FAA Face Tough Budget Battle as House and Senate Clash
FAA Commercial Space Office Fares Much Better in Senate, House Cut Would be “Crippling”, Space Policy Online
“The House and Senate Appropriations Committees completed action on the FY2014 funding bill that includes the FAA this week. The two took opposite approaches to funding the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace calls a substantial cut approved by the House committee “crippling.” Conversely, the Senate committee recommended more than the request.
On Thursday, the full House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY2014 Transportation-HUD (T-HUD) bill, making no change to the almost 12 percent cut to AST recommended by its T-HUD subcommittee: $14.16 million instead of the $16.01 million requested. That is roughly 8 percent less than its current funding level.”
Related:
– Senator Nelson Weighs in NASA Authorization Bill
– Space Development: Going Everywhere and Nowhere
– Hearing Today: NASA Authorization Act of 2013
– FAA Commercial Space Launch Office Deep Budget Cut Possible
– Draft Only: Highlights of the NASA Authorization Act of 2013
Marc’s note: After the 4th of July break the budget battle will be back on and it’s shaping up to be quite a battle as the House and Senate clash.
UPDATE: Just before the holiday Space News reported that an “undated 35-page legislative proposal — which also contains many noncommercialization suggestions for Congress to consider — was crafted by NASA in response to the draft NASA authorization bill unveiled June 19 by the Republican leadership of House Science, Space and Technology space subcommittee.
… An industry source agreed that a NASA authorization bill is far from a certainty this year, and added that a regular appropriation bill is even more unlikely.
Congressional staffers “are telling us to expect an omnibus appropriations [bill] for 2014,” the source said June 28.”
Marc’s note: It’s looking more like a stalemate with Congress having forgotten what the word bipartisan means.
In my view this is important. The DOD can do many amazing things, but it cannot regulate commercial industry at competitive cost. We need the FAA to take over regulation of commercial launches from Florida from the Eastern Test Range or Florida is going to lose big to the non-DOD and non-US launch sites. We have been hearing about “range modernization” for 25 years now but we still can’t do two launches in a day, and there are no standards; every launch requires individual approval. The first F9 was delayed for months before the Range finally decided SpaceX had to use a 40-year-old Ensign Bickford booster destruct system. And then they had to bump two hitchhikers from the trunk because they couldn’t prove that they wouldn’t interfere with the range safety receiver.
I’d be less annoyed if I thought this was a debate about the issues involved, but I see it instead as a battle over who’s in charge.
More from the article linked above: “The House-passed budget resolution holds non-defense discretionary
spending to levels below what is required by the sequester, while the
Senate’s version assumes the sequester will be replaced with a different
method of deficit reduction.”
The Senate is in la-la land if they think the sequester will be replaced now. The House appears to be taking the prudent road by continuing to try and reduce the deficit spending of the current administration whereas the Senate appears to want to spend more and figure out how to pay for it later (and oh by the way, raise the debt ceiling once again later this year). I guess it is the new Democrat strategy, spend then tax. Fits the argument that it is better to beg forgiveness than permission.
Obviously political posturing is only taking place within one party. Therefore, things must be as black and white as you say. I find partisan arguments ultimately fail when it comes to addressing any issue objectively, and that includes the current NASA budget issue, the sequester, and the federal budget in general.
I agree. We need to cut wasteful programs that spend billions and produce nothing. Wait a minute, that would be Constellation/SLS/Orion. No, that was started by Bush, so it must be good, even though it is pure industrial socialism. Commercial Crew, though conceived under Bush, was actualized under Obama, therefore it is evil.
More seriously, partisan posturing just means ineffectual government.
I wonder how much money is being spent debating this less-than-$2 million difference. If we then add to that the costs of all the similar pocket-change-budget debates going on and look at the total amount being spent on non-bipartisan budget haggling, and the costs resulting from budget-debate-induced program delays, the money being spent may well be approaching the amount of money they’re supposedly attempting to save/cut.
It seems to me that since the original announcement of the sequestration a lot of powerful, high-paid people have been floundering trying to solve a problem that they don’t really know how to solve. Maybe the fixed-percentage-across-the-board-cut idea is the way the to go, since they can quit farting around and let the government and the country get back to work instead of creating ever-increasing costs and delays in exchange for no tangible benefits.
Tax dollars should ideally be paying for essential services and investments. This SequestorRama fiddling is neither.
“Across-the-board” cuts mean that Congress isn’t willing to do its duty and eliminate programs that are not worth their cost (e.g. Orion/SLS) to support programs that are cost-effective (e.g. Commercial Crew). But the biggest problem here isn’t spending, it’s tax cuts. Obama should never have made the Bush Tax Cuts permanent when even under the sequester the deficit is unsustainable. All he had to do was nothing, let the tax cuts expire, or at most continue them for another year. Making them permanent puts US taxes lower than any other major industrial power and lower than US taxes have been since the dawn of the space age. The public has been told taxes are evil and won’t allow them to be returned to an appropriate level for at least a decade, possibly much more.
Consequently, although it will take a few years to sink in, thee simply are not enough tax dollars to sustain the current space program. The overall real NASA budget will have to be cut significantly from even the current sequester level. That’s the future we need to prepare for.
I don’t see how spending, tax cuts, deficit and inflation can be addressed separately. They are all interdependent. But then again, like most people, I am not familiar with the fine details of the fiscal situation (I suspect that far too many people are not even familiar with the basics, let alone the details.)
But the common man can understand simple concepts like, we’ve reduced the amount of taxes you’re paying and like that idea without worrying about what the costs and consequences of it might be. So I think that retaining the tax breaks is really just a political survival tool in Obama’s tool box (or that of any other President).
Additionally, Obama has publicly “challenged” Congress to bring him legislation for this, that and the other issue, with no public discussion or presentation of how viable a given piece of legislation might be. Once again, Joe Average does not know or understand the details of the issue, so the President gets to say, I tried but Congress didn’t do anything about it. More political survival.
From one issue to the next is Congress failing to act because there is no good answer from their perspective, because it clashes with their individual agendas, because they want to road block the President and try to lay the blame at his feet, or some other reason(s)?
The answers to these questions might be interesting, even useful, but the bottom line is still that a lot of things have ground to a halt and no resolution/decision is being made. I see this stalemate as the biggest problem to be solved right now. Little is happening to either implement or change the current non-plans, and this is costing the taxpayers, and the country as whole, more with every day that passes.
I think history will look back on this sequestration business and ask, what the hell were they doing? Why did it go on for so long? It’s inescapable that budgets will be cut, but will it be done intelligently and will it be done in time to make a difference? The clock is ticking. Am I missing something?
The current political stalemate between Congress and the White House is, I think, the greatest issue the US is facing right now. I don’t foresee any resolution in the near or far term, and in fact, I can see this stalemate lasting to the end of Obama’s term, if not into the next president’s term. All parties are intrenched and unwilling to move. I fear the fallout from this will be far reaching and big.
As for space programs, I don’t think anything is safe, including commercial space interests. Sadly I think that congressional intransigence will mean that something like SLS will go on unchallenged and will continue to bleed funds away from much better projects and from a real effort to get beyond LEO and develop a sustainable program.
I think you’ve got it exactly right. What surprises me is that this seems to be ignored, or not recognized, by the media, the citizens and the majority of the politicians. Do they not care? Are they too embarrassed by it to speak up? Or perhaps people just don’t consider it to be all that important relative to their day to day affairs. So many opportunities and so much time is being lost. And as you say, it appears likely to continue on and not end any time soon. It seems to me like everybody is just treading water and hoping a big wave doesn’t come in.