Senate Appropriations Budget Action Starts
NASA Excerpts: FY2017 Commerce, Justice & Science Appropriations Bill Clears Senate Subcommittee
“The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies today approved a $56.3 billion spending bill to support national security, law enforcement and American scientific innovation. … National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – $19.3 billion for NASA, $21 million over the FY2016 enacted level and $1 billion above the FY2017 NASA budget request, to support the human and robotic exploration of space, fund science missions that enhance the understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe, and support fundamental aeronautics research. This includes: …”
Good God. Why doesn’t the Senate simply send appropriations checks
directly to the SLS contractors. The same amount of money would be
wasted, but it would be more honest, and NASA wouldn’t be burdened with the management overhead.
The “management overhead” provides government jobs, another benefit to the congressional district.
The management overhead also pays for something more important. They provide the justification. Congressmen can’t just vote to send people in their districts checks. There has to be some excuse. It can be superficial, dubious or not something which would survive careful examination. But the justification has to exist if the congressmen want to be reelected. Managers are better than congressional staffers when it comes to inventing plausible but superficial justifications of this sort.
Some very good news on the budget front. Commercial Crew is fully funded, SLS/Orion are well funded, and the EUS receives $300 Million.
I do not consider SLS being well funded to be a good thing. It’s sucking up far too much of NASA’s budget. Also, it’s so expensive to launch that its flight rate will be so low that it won’t be safe to fly. Its high costs leave little funding for any actual payloads for meaningful missions.
In an era where affordable reusable launch vehicles are (finally!) being developed and flown, the completely disposable SLS launch vehicle is a hideously expensive technological throw back. SSMEs, one of the best reusable liquid fueled rocket engines ever built, at the bottom of the ocean won’t lower launch costs.
With apologies to those here working daily on SLS and related hardware:
SLS will never fly, beyond a test or (maybe) two.
You heard it here first.
Congress will not throw those workers under the bus.
That is an entirely different thing. Congress has itself in a hell of a pickle on this one: protect the workers and watch government-led launch services die like a dinosaur, or slough SLS like an old skin and move forward.
I hope the solution is more creative than my own probably myopic and zero-sum assessment.
Exactly. The solution is to continue heading the way NASA is going with the various cost sharing space act agreements. And then buying the services that it needs from the commercial space economy that it is helping to establish. But that would sure leave an awful lot of NASA centers and workers with very little to do. That creative solution has got to take care of those folks in a meaningful way. And I’m thinking that it would take a more engaged president to lead that effort. He’s going to have to offer those space state politicians something that they can live with.
And it’s more than simply jobs for jobs’ sake, isn’t it? Yes, there are tens of thousands of families involved, but consider what happened to the aerospace industry in southern California as one discrete example: we lost machinists and engineers, coders and managers, all of who knew how to do something very very special and unique. Those guys are gone. Similarly here in Florida with the advent of ULA (a complex subject, for sure).
The country simply needs these abilities. It isn’t complicated. And maybe, just maybe, as we transition to private LEO access, NASA can go back to the future: develop new stuff in partnership with private industry.
I have my doubts.
I guess that the best news is that NASA and the Air Force simply can’t afford to do business the old fashioned way. Even with all the foot dragers doing their best to keep us imprisoned in the last century, those organizations just can’t move forward without the silicon valley style geniuses leading the charge. Dragon, AMF and BEAM are the tip of the spear. (And I must give credit to Cygnus and Starliner for being products of Old School doing things in a new way.)
Sorry to say however you weren’t the first. When SLS was first mooted and had to use legacy hardware, etc. there were many on the various blogs who predicted exactly the same thing. I was one.
Mind you, not a difficult thing to predict when you look back as some of NASA’s past efforts.
Cheers.
I work on SLS (software) and I agree with you!
” the completely disposable SLS launch vehicle is a hideously expensive technological throw back. “
Nicely said. But I’m guessing that the Falcon Heavy is going to have to rack up a serious track record before we have any hope of the SLS being killed off.
That is true, and may take many years. But the sad fact is that SLS is a dead man walking, even though its higher brain functions have stopped completely.
Can someone please explain why both houses as well as the WH needs to create budgets and then reconcile them? Has this something to do with the way there is no single government but the 3 form a pseudo-single entity that then has to work together somehow.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
The White House submits budget requests to the Congress. They show what the administration’s priorities are and what funding levels are recommended to Congress. The budget request has no legal authority.
The House and Senate pass their versions of the budget and then get together to iron out differences (since according to the Constitution the same bill has to pass both the House and Senate). Then it gets sent to the President, who can either veto it or let it become law.
The system was designed to prevent consolidation of power in one entity (Congress, President etc.) and force people of differing viewpoints to talk to one another to gain consensus. Its too bad that many people in Congress today cannot see past their own re-election.
In theory all appropriations bills are supposed to originate in the House. There is nothing in the Constitution to suggest that similar but not identical bills should be created simultaneously in both House and Senate. This has become the practice because it confers extraordinary power on those appointed to the House-Senate “conference committees” to make deals in smoke-filled rooms out of public view but easily accessible to lobbyists.
You are correct that there is nothing in the Constitution that suggests the House and Senate create simultaneous budget bills. Appropriations bills have to start in the House (and technically they still do today). I was referring to the budget bill having to pass both houses of Congress in order to become law.
Even if there were not simultaneous efforts there would still have to be conferences between the House and the Senate since the Senate would likely amend the House bill.
Why the federal government and all the states (except Nebraska) have two separate legislative chambers is beyond me. As far as I can tell they are redundant. A substantial number of nations and provinces are unicameral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The two chambers still have some unique duties (although there were more differences in the past). Many other nations have bicameral legislatures (Britain, Germany, etc.)
Originally the federal Senate was elected by the state legislatures while the House was directly elected by the people. The Senate represented the interests of the individual states while the House represented the people at large. That changed when the 17th Amendment provided for direct election of Senators in 1913.
As I said though there are still differences. The Senate confirms judges, the House doesn’t. The Senate approves treaties, the House doesn’t etc.
The Senate helped to insure legislators from more populous northern states would not outlaw slavery.
Surely the historical roots for this arrangement are well known to you?
Even assessing the situation today, bicameral has as chief advantage dissolving authority into more and disparate hands.
I’d have to say that the since the House is currently non-reflective of actual voters’ wishes and since the Senate is laughably non-proportioned there are bigger issues in American government.
Since the number of representatives from a state in the House is based on the population of that state, states with bigger populations have an advantage in the House. To balance this out, the Senate has equal representation (two) from every state.
You would be very hard-pressed to document any sort of balance other than as a fanciful abstraction.
Moreover, don’t look at the bicameral situation through 2016 eyes. In 1776 the division was thought of as a way to restrain the liberal ravages of popularly-elected Representatives who might raid the Treasury (for instance).
Hasn’t worked out quite like that.