FY 2020 NASA Budget: Doing More With Less Money?
March 11 Events Highlight NASA’s Moon to Mars Plans, FY 2020 Budget
“NASA invites media and social media to agency centers across the country Monday, March 11, to get an up-close look at America’s work to return astronauts to the Moon and on to Mars, following the delivery of President Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal to the U.S. Congress.”
NASA could see a 5 percent budget cut next year, official says, Houston Chronicle
“President Donald Trump is expected to propose a 5 percent cut to NASA’s budget next year, a decision that stands in stark contrast to the president’s pushed to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972. The proposed cuts — part of sweeping cuts to non-defense discretionary spending in every agency — was disclosed in an article published online Monday by Russ Vought, acting head of the Office of Management and Budget. “It’s unfortunate that once again when everyone is getting excited about going back to the moon … that the announcement is on the heels of cuts for NASA,” said Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a website devoted to space news. “This is not the signal you would hope to see at an agency that is about to embark on a multi-decade program of returning to and exploring the moon. … “Again, NASA is caught making all these plans with faith-based projections where budgets will be,” Cowing said. “There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, but at the end of the day, you can’t just click your heels three times and hope money falls out of the sky.”
Keith’s note: It is going to be interesting to see how NASA is affected by the 5% across the board cuts that the White House is planning to make. For NASA that could mean as much as half a billion dollars or so. While the Vice President has all but set up a second home at NASA, his enthusiasm for space exploration needs to be followed with the funding to make all of the promises actually happen. Add in the chronic problems with SLS (which always require more money to fix), the inability for NASA to get its ISS privatization/commercialization plans implemented (while CASIS fumbles everything); and the challenge of keeping enthusiasm going for a first (return) human landing still a decade away. And then there’s the impending pivot in the House on Earth and climate science, and the funding equation NASA is confronted with is as challenging as it has ever been.
I used to believe that there would be cuts in budgets (not just NASA). No more. It is all monopoly money. That being said, and I know this will never happen, but I sure would like to see:
Revamp SMD. Purchase 30 Falcon 9 rides over five years. Reduce Flagship missions and up Explorer and Discovery Class missions. Figure out a way to invest more into missions and less into infrastructure. Reward innovation and punish bureaucracy.
Kill SLS now. Re-invest money into New Armstrong and BFR requirements. Develop lunar settlement architecture on capabilities. Start developing hardware the private sector cannot.
Prizes. Partner with private sector to promote innovation, exploration, and settlement. Send a “flock of doves” to Mars… and Venus.
NASA needs to break the mold, change the pattern, innovate and inspire.
Figure out how to downplay myopic elected officials and build upon our ingenuity.
Good Job Professor Griff* for coming up with “commercial”.
Good Job President Bush for installing Griff to do this.
Good Job President Obama for pushing “commercial”.
Good Job President Trump for continuing to push “commercial”.
* Professor Griff never had any intention of “commercial” ever working but it did.
A billion dollars doesn’t get you much – kill the pork and lets go.
I saw the sarcasm, but just for pedantry’s sake, Commercial Cargo didn’t come from Griffin, it came from O’Keefe. All Griffin did was scrap “COTS-D” which was the crew component, to be resurrected under the next guy, against the efforts of the House of Reps, with Griffin white-anting from the sidelines.
Evidence that Administrator Griffin was aiding from the sidelines? Or just more speculation from a far?
BTW the program you are referring to was known as assured.access and came out of alt.access portion of the Space Launch Initiative (SLI). It actualy dates to 2000. Here are a couple of stories Keith did on it, the first before the Columbia Accident.
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
SLI Takes A Small Step Forward Into An Uncertain Future
By Keith Cowing
Posted Wednesday, May 1, 2002
“The intent of the SLI program, according to Smith, is “to develop far more reliable, more affordable access to space.” One of the main goals is to enhance launch safety for the current Space Shuttle risk level which ranges between 1 accident /250 launches and 1 accident / 500 down to 1 accident in 10,000 launches. SLI also seeks to dramatically cut the cost of placing things into space by two-thirds i.e. to around $1,000 per pound.”
and
“While these goals are rather straightforward, one aspect of SLI is not: the role of the private or commercial sector. According to Smith NASA needs to design a system to fit into the national [launch] infrastructure – owned and operated by the commercial sector even if the government is one of – or the only investor.” “
And then after the Columbia Accident
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
NASA Changes The Focus Of Future ISS Cargo Delivery Plans
By Keith Cowing, NASA Watch
Posted Tuesday, October 7, 2003
“The initial idea of Alt Access was to find ways to augment the planned cargo capability for the Space Shuttle, Europe’s ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle), Japan’s HTV (H-II Transfer Vehicle) and Russia’s Progress vehicles.
NASA now uses the phrase “Assured Access” to supplant “Alternate Access” to describe its interest in new cargo capabilities to the ISS.”
and
“”Alternate” means of delivering cargo is no longer the highest driver – making sure that cargo can be delivered is. This “assured” capability is needed to replace the cargo carrying capability of the Space Shuttle which NASA now feels pressured to retire (at least as a vehicle carrying humans) much sooner than it had planned to – and to replace its human transport capabilities with the Orbital Space Plane (OSP).”
And for more reading, the official NASA history of COTS which dates the first alt.access study contracts to August 2000.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
Commercial Orbit Transportation Services
The Alternate Access to Station (AAS) program formed an important part of SLI. In August 2000, AAS distributed a total of $902,000 to four small businesses—Andrews Space, Microcosm Inc., HMX, Inc., and Kistler Aerospace Corp.—to
conduct a 90-day study on the feasibility of developing commercial vehicles for contingency resupply to the International Space Station, capable of launching within one week’s notice. Kistler, which in February 2006 would mergewith Rocketplane Global to form Rocketplane Kistler, later would be awarded COTS money for the development of its K-1 launch system.”
and
“Over the course of the next two years, before the cancellation of SLI in 2002, AAS participants helped develop several of the concepts and vehicles that would be seen in COTS and follow-on commercial initiatives.”
So actually it roots go to Administrator Dan Goldin and the Clinton Administration. But this just shows how long it takes new ideas to take root at NASA.
I remember discussing Alt.Access during one of the March Storms events where space advocates go to Washington to brief members of Congress on it. It was an item on the March Storm agenda. Have you ever taken part in a March Storm event?
I’m not understanding the statement that crew was opposed by the House of Representatives. NASA’s 2008 Authorization Act directed the Agency to pursue commercial crew and NASA conducted the CCDev competition in 2008, with awards announced during the 2009 budget roll-out.
Commercial crew was always a struggle because the appropriators underfunded it, but NASA has been authorized by Congress to do commercial crew for a decade.
I’m no fan of Griffin, but at least he didn’t kill the rest of COTS, too.
Most COTS credit goes to Obama, Bolden and Garver for COTS, but I’m willing to give a little to Mike Griffin.
Whenever I find myself going down a very similar and attractive road I realize that I am being entirely wrong headed.
Why? Because those officials are in actuality stand-ins for our selves, and for our fellow citizens. Every time a “myopic official” makes a decision he is acting for some group of citizens. The ‘mess’ we see is nothing more than a reflection of ourselves across this great country. We are a messy people, argumentative, frequently given to mob behavior; we are intellectually lazy, prejudiced, often selfish. We are needlessly self-deprecating. We fail frequently to recognize our accomplishments.
And we are capable of so many great things, as we have proven time and time again. That is the stunning fact of our political system. When we are motivated, for whatever reason, we accomplish great things. And here’s the hell of it: making changes is really, really hard work. Make the process easier and we will have given up the very thing that makes us special.
(And I disagree with you about the efficacy of pork- before it was largely abolished we built libraries and ball parks all across America. But that’s a different subject).
Folks were building libraries and ballparks before the federal income tax. They were building them because they had the money locally to do so. But now that money goes to Washington, where their Congress Critters have to fight over earmarks to bring the money back to the community to build libraries and ball parks since the communities no longer have the money to do so since it went to Washington as taxes.
The problem is that federal incomes taxes, and earmarks, have been around so long folks forgot what the world was like before them. And government contractors have gotten so skilled at maximizing the money they get from the federal government that we have no sense of what true costs to do things are anymore. And this especially applies to spaceflight which is mostly a government activity.
“I used to believe that there would be cuts in budgets (not just NASA). No more. It is all monopoly money.” – That’s an odd take. The facts don’t support this assertion.
What has happened most recently is that the Republicans in Congress passed (and the Republican president signed) tax cuts in conjunction with increased budgets in some areas.
This has resulted in increasing the deficit. From these facts we can conclude that the Republicans in Washington D.C. can no longer call themselves “fiscally responsible”.
But wait! Now that the Democrats control the House of Representatives, we’re already hearing cries from those same Republicans saying we can’t possibly afford anything that the Democrats want to spend money on. This is blatant hypocrisy.
Jeff, Jeff, JEFF! You are SO missing the point!
See, it goes like this: the Republicans are protecting the job creators! Don’t you see that? Take a guy makes $100 (edit: adding the word “million” here actually makes some sense…)a year, and all of a sudden now his take home is, for instance, $110 million a year. What do you think she is going to do with that money! That money gets plowed into jobs-creating enterprises!
Just like Kansas!
To be fair, people on the opposite end of the political spectrum say almost the same thing about people earning far less. Someone making $33,000 instead of $30,000 might be able to go out to dinner more often, or buy a new instead of a used car, etc. And that’s good for the economy and helps create jobs.
My complaint about both arguments is that, if we’re going to spend money just to keep in in circulation, why can’t we spend it on something useful? And, honestly, governments don’t have a stellar track record when it comes to spending money on useful things.
“governments don’t have a stellar track record when it comes to spending money on useful things”
That sounds like the kind of thing agreeable to almost everyone, doesn’t it? I’m not (entirely) convinced it’s true; in fact, it’s a meme that picked up quite a bit of steam thanks to St. Ronnie (“government IS the problem”).
My own experience with government, aside from that of any other citizen, is in the regulatory arena at all three levels; and here I can say that judicious use of available funds is the norm.
A dispassionate inspection of government is likely to show the same. And, yes, I know, there’s all sorts of shouting about ‘government waste’, and likely that’s partly true. But it’s also true that much criticism compares governmental action to that of ‘business’, as if that’s some sort of golden standard- or even relevant, for that matter.
Argh.
Well, to be fair, individual people also don’t have a stellar track record of spending their money on useful things. But I will argue that many governments spend their money less efficiently.
Specifically, they have often place oversight and accountability above cost. Acquisitions regulations, permissions for spending on various things, etc. often cost more than just handing out money. Cost plus contracts are a frequently cited example. They exist to make sure someone isn’t charging excessive profits, not to make sure the overall cost is low.
Governments can also be large and bureaucracy, and that’s often inefficient. There are many cases of someone causing a net increase in cost by making sure the cost didn’t come out of his department’s budget. Or asserting the importance of his department, and justifying their jobs, by unnecessarily making someone else do things the hard way.
And, some governments which have trouble coping with long term goals. When funding and policy are set by someone focused on the next election, it’s hard to efficiently manage decade-long projects. But that’s probably an inevitable price of frequent elections and a government which is responsive to the public.
And, again, none of that is unique to governments. They just seem to be a bit worse about it. A private individual can’t be large and bureaucracy by himself, and often does think more than two, four or six years ahead (but not always.) And sometimes people make really stupid choices along the lines of tracking costs (I know someone who spend an hour of his time in order to save a couple dollars…) And large, private organizations can have all or most of those government problems I listed off. But, some major religious organizations aside, private organizations have to keep inefficiency within limits to continue existing.
Also in the spirit of being fair, many of those government inefficiencies come from things we asked for or want. So there’s a limit on how far I can fairly complain about them.
I think the big difference is that the person making $33,000 a year instead of $30,000 a year is extremely likely to spend that extra $3,000 a year rather than invest it. And they’re also very likely to spend that extra $3,000 a year in their local community (things like Amazon, telecommunications, and etc. are the obvious exception to this).
Where someone making $110 million a year instead of $100 million a year is far less likely to spend that extra $10 million (they’ll invest it instead). Also, even if they spend that extra $10 million, it’s less likely it will be spent locally (i.e. vacations, foreign exotic sports cars, vacation homes, and etc). I’d even argue at some point it becomes likely that extra money is going to be invested outside of this country (tax shelters anyone?).
You give a working class “Joe” a bump in disposable income, that income is spent in the local economy creating jobs for others. “Joe” is the engine that drives our consumer economy (since we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing overseas, that’s what we have left).
The dirty secret of tax cuts for “job creators” is that a billionaire making an extra $10 million a year is far more likely to reinvest that money, rather than spend it, with a fair chance that it will end up in an off shore tax shelter. So we tend to see a short term bump in the economy and then that bump dissipates (which is what we’re seeing today from the Republican/Trump tax cut).
Bringing this back to governments, other first world countries have healthcare for all, retirement benefits, college education that is either free or nearly so, good public transportation, and etc. None of these things are free (taxes do pay for the vast majority of this), but what it does is free the working and middle class from debt and lets them spend the money they do make, putting it right back in their local economies.
But here is the US, we’re saddling our younger middle class with crushing college debt, the majority of individual bankruptcies here are due to crushing medical debt, and the government benefits for retirees are barely enough to live on. All of these things put a huge drain on our consumer based economy.
While one can argue that government spending on these sorts of programs isn’t as efficient as it could be, these programs enable the long term economic stability of the working and middle class enabling them to spend more locally, fueling our consumer based economy.
That is not what the actual data shows, but then I find folks prefer political talking points to actual research results.
https://www.reuters.com/art…
July 27, 2018 / 10:22 AM
Global foreign investment flows tumble on Trump’s tax reform, OECD says
“It found that global foreign direct investment outflows tumbled 44 percent to $136 billion in the first quarter of this year, from $242 billion in the previous quarter.”
It plain English, because of lower tax rates, Americans were more likely to invest in the U.S.A. than send their money outside of the nation to those “tax shelters”. You see, the lower the tax rate, the less attractive tax shelters are to investors. Those tax shelters only emerged in the 1950’s when the top marginal tax rate was in the 90% range.
And returning this to space. If it wasn’t for those lower tax rates, starting with President Reagen, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have the money to invest in their space ventures.
That’s not what the article says.
“At this point it probably is essentially their financial assets, cash holdings that they’re bringing and it’s probably not going to have an immediate impact in terms of employment or value added at their foreign operations,” the OECD’s Borga said. “We don’t really know what’s going to happen in the long term.”
Of course the OECD doesn’t know because they have never been in a world when jobs and investment were flowing from the foreign countries to the U.S. at a higher rate than it flows out. That is a paradigm shift they are going to have trouble grasping.
“The dirty secret of tax cuts for “job creators” is that a billionaire making an extra $10 million a year is far more likely to reinvest that money, rather than spend it…”
That’s actually the point. Someone invests that $10 million in Amazon, Amazon uses it to open their new facility in Arlington, Virginia, and that creates 38,000 new, local jobs (directly and indirectly.) How accurate that theory is, is a matter of debate. But as far as I know, no one’s suggested a millionaire would put that extra $10 million into eating out at a fancy restaurant with his 300 best friends, every day of the year.
Although the latter would also be creating jobs. Indeed, the business plan of Virgin Galactic is built around rich folks paying to ride into space. But if the government has a high tax rate than number of individuals who are able to afford to be space tourists drops.
In terms of investment, the Bureau of Economic Advisors has worked hard to develop an accurate Regional Input-output Modeling System that allows to determine the impact of spending/investment inputs in different sectors of the economy.
https://www.bea.gov/resourc…
Unless Amazon issues new stock, that $10 million can only be used to buy stock from other stockholders on the open market. Therefore, Amazon derives no immediate financial benefit from the trading of its stock.
And as far as the corporate tax cuts are concerned, studies after the fact have found that companies largely used that added money from the tax cut to buy back their own stock instead of adding jobs. This drives up the stock price, which is great for the executives that are compensated partly in stock options.
The bottom line is that if companies are using the tax cut to largely buy back their own stock, there are actually fewer opportunities for investors to buy newly issued stock.
In this last round of corporate and high income tax cuts, large scale job creation just hasn’t happened.
But you are not taking account the money that folks are getting from selling the Amazon stock. For every buyer of stock there is a seller. And the money they get from selling their stock may be used to buy a new home, automobile, etc. Or put into a startup. Or Jeff Bezos may spend it on Blue Origins if it’s his shares they are buying. Same with the stock buy back. The sellers of that stock will either spend the money to buy something or reinvest it. And the rising price of the stock encourages other folks to invest in other ventures instead of spending because of the promise of an ROI.
And then there is the leakage of imports. Low increase folks may spend the extra money, but if it’s on goods from China than it dosen’t benefit America workers. Hence the need to force fair trade on China with tariffs as high on their goods as they put on American goods.
Because China has a 25% tariff on auto imports Elon Musk is building a Tesla plant there. The EU has a 10% tariff on auto imports. Compare this to the 2.5% tariffs on automobiles imported into the United States. Is it any wonder the America automobile industry has declined because of trade that is unfair.
And if you do not have consumers with disposable incomes it doesn’t matter if amazon builds 1000 stores..
A great piece on that so lets play millionaires island.
http://www.businessinsider….
I find it interesting that quite a few of the things that American civilization may be remembered for were government programs. Defeating the Japanese empire, defeating communism, landing on the moon, nuclear weapons and power, the interstate highway system, Arpanet/internet…
Also the Panama Canal and the space shuttle.
“To be fair, people on the opposite end of the political spectrum say almost the same thing about people earning far less. Someone making $33,000 instead of $30,000 might be able to go out to dinner more often, or buy a new instead of a used car, etc. And that’s good for the economy and helps create jobs.”
“11 Million Taxpayers Losing $323 Billion In Deductions In Trump Tax Hit
More bad news for middle America after corporate taxes were slashed.”
https://www.huffpost.com/en…
It’d be nice if they could do more with the same amount of money. No idea how you’d do that for the human spaceflight program.
“No idea how you’d do that for the human spaceflight program.”
Until about 2005 I would have agreed. Nowadays, though, we have an example showing us a better way forward, an example that started from an idea that will come to dominate the future.
Cancel SLS, buy commercial launches. For “NASA specific needs”, work with the US launch industry on meeting NASA’s launch vehicle needs via commercial fixed price, milestone driven and rewarded contracts. In other words, use the wildly successful model of commercial cargo and commercial crew in the area of launch vehicles.
That $2+ billion being spent on SLS could meet NASA’s launch needs and you’d still have $1+ billion leftover to spend on actual probes and crewed missions to launch.
Just out of curiosity, how much and how broadly was the mission mode discussed, for all the architectures from Space Exploration Initiative on? I know about all the studies, but not about how much they explored fundamentally different alternatives before settling on one thing.
In the case of Apollo, all sorts of mission modes were considered and debated. It’s possible to say how and why they settled on a big rocket (but not really, really big one) and lunar orbit rendezvous. You can see how we ended up with the Saturn 5 but not Nova. I can’t say the same about the reasoning which led to SLS.
I think it was just based on a lack of knowledge on the part of NASA and the Old Space industry. The Apollo generation had built many different types of rockets and so had experience in making those types of decision. The current generation has only worked with the Shuttle system and so its experience is very limited.
I don’t have any inside information on this process, unfortunately.
There’s about as much detail as one can stand in a podcast called space rocket history.
I have a feeling that NASA will do well with possibily a budget increase given all that is going on. Remember, the original article by Russ Vought never mentioned NASA and was just talking about federal agencies in general and there are many that this Administration does not “favor” like it does NASA. But we will see next week when its announced.
While searching for some of the old Spaceref posts on Alt.access, and SpaceRef seems to be the only place to find information on that long forgotten program that was the foundation for COTS and CCP, I found this great op-ed by Keith written in 2002 about the need for NASA to get serious about going somewhere instead of going in circles. Although some of the recommendations have been partially implemented, like using the ISS to do medical research for missions to Mars, other haven’t. I hope Keith doesn’t mind my posting a link to it as much of it seems just as relevant today as when written in 2002.
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
Let’s Stop Going in Circles – And Go Somewhere
By Keith Cowing
Posted Sunday, May 12, 2002
Lots of those old posts are as relevant today as when written- just change the date.
Griffin cancelled the cargo version of Orion in 2007 to start commercial resupply. He told me the plan was to develop/use commercial resupply for ISS and when the vendors proved the ability to do that, bring them on to carry crew to ISS. Ares I was intended to only carry crew to ISS until the commercial options became available. After that it was all to be commercial crew to ISS and NASA would concentrate its attention and Orion on the moon and beyond. The principle reason for Griffin running Ares I/CxP like that was to regain the capability to build rocxkets within NASA. Over the years that ability had rightly migrated into industry and the government folks at that time would have had trouble getting a stomp rocket to fly. That basic lack of knowledge and experience is why today SLS is moving at the pace it is. NASA needs to buy rockets, not build them. I’m told part of the reason NASA may face a 5% hit was because of a public rebuke by the last NASA admin about going to Mars within the current president’s term.
Mr. Horse:
After reading your post several days ago, I wondered if anyone would offer an alternative interpretation. As you relate the events, Dr. Griffin appears as quite the statesman, which is somewhat contrary to many views posted here.
Steve Cook said “we are building the rocket we are directed to build, no the one we want.” Mike Griffin was tasked with creating infrastructure for replacing the shuttle, creating a commercial market for ISS, teaching NASA how to build rockets, going back to the moon and putting massive cargo on orbit. All while adhering to the recommendations from the Columbia investigation. A hard task, made even more difficult by some civil servants. NASA is on its way to being a 21st century NACA. Little can change that now.
I’d argue NASA lost the ability to “build rockets” when it fixed the design of the space shuttle system back in the 1970s and never actively worked on a follow-on system. Everything since then has been tweaks to the existing systems.
By the time Ares started, designing an entire launch system from scratch was an ability that had already been lost by NASA. This was only partly due to “brain drain” of engineers, But I’d argue that it was mostly due to the politics of having to spread the money around to as many congressional districts as possible (i.e. pork). This saddled NASA with the lie that reusing shuttle components would be faster, better, and cheaper than designing something from scratch. It was a lie because they ended up changing everything they “reused” making it essentially new again, requiring completely new analysis, design, testing, and certification.
That’s why Ares failed and why SLS is also failing. Pork and bad management. We’re spending $2+ billion a year on SLS with the schedule slipping about a year for every year we spend money on it. At this point it should be clear to everyone that retaining the ability of NASA to “build rockets” is as useful as retaining their ability to “build passenger aircraft”.
“…I’d argue that it was mostly due to the politics of having to spread the money around to as many congressional districts as possible (i.e. pork)…”
That may be true, but it’s also not anything new. If you look at NASA plans for the post-Apollo period, this was also an issue then. They were very concerned about spending money in the right places and making sure the planned projects gave every NASA center something to do. And, even earlier in 1961, the locations of Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson) and Mississippi Test Operations (now Stennis), and transferring Michoud to NASA, were definitely influenced by spending money in the right states and congressional districts. I’m not sure about locating Goddard in Maryland.
Anyway, with that history of spending money in the right places, I’m not sure about Ares and SLS. They were and are a mess, but is pork the reason? Maybe it’s gotten worse, or there’s more involved. But I’d look for something which changed between earlier, successful programs and Ares/SLS.
Some of it might be less tight management, but I think the biggest reason is that there’s simply less budget money going around. They’re trying to do projects spread across the same centers and states as they did when their budget was three times larger* in real dollar terms, and it doesn’t work as well – it spreads them thin, makes inefficiencies in the project organization result in more damage and delays to its implementation.
If the US cut its military budget to a third of what it was, but then tried to keep personnel and base numbers the same, it would probably cause the same type of problem.
* That actually kind of understates the drop, because the percentage of the budget allocated to human spaceflight was higher back in the Space Race Era as well.
It was definitely good politics at the time. The Apollo Program was never wildly popular in the 1960s – it generally polled below 50% of public support, and even after Apollo 11 it was only something like 53% of the public in favor. Keeping it alive against public pressure for other uses of the funds (and there was plenty of other stuff that demanded money in that period) required some clever political engineering by Johnson and the program’s supporters in Congress.
That’s also why I tend to be skeptical that strong public outreach will make for a better funded space program today.
I agree. Public outreach will do little to help NASA. The key is getting the cost down to where private efforts will make it possible to explore and settle space. In this sense I see NASA taking on a role similar to the U.S. Geological Survey, and its precursors, in the exploration and development of space in providing a knowledge base and doing the preliminary surveying for the private ventures.
I mean, why even bother talking about this? Presidents have had in effect zero influence on the shape of the final budget for about a decade. Since 2011 especially, Presidential Budget Requests have gone from being semi-serious documents that were taken semi-seriously as a starting point (especially by the President’s party) into pure political signaling documents that both parties in Congress completely ignore, before writing their own budget that looks nothing like it. This been true under Democrat and Republican control of bother chambers, and of the Presidency. PBRs have less in common than passed budgets in the last 10 years than any other time in our life times. And there is no indication that is going to change anytime soon.
For years now, and especially since the first two year budget deal in 2015, Democrats and Republicans have established a broad, working consensus on what to spend money on and how much. Oh sure they argue at the fringes about relatively minor things. But not the top line to anything. It is after all, money to every’s districts and States.
And most importantly of all: these budgets have not reflected Presidential priorities for many years. Congress, no matter the party, has many budgets under their belt now that show that, by in large, they legitimately do not care what the President wants. Relevant to this topic, one just has to look at the NASA budget going back to the early 2010s. Not one of them as passed and signed by the President looks anywhere close to any of the PBRs.
Remember how we all criticized at length the “Senate Launch System” and how the SLS was mandated by Congress, over what NASA and the President wanted. Guess what: at about the same time, and in the years since, that basically happened everywhere in the budget, for both Obama and Trump.
So what is going on right now? Donald Trump will release his PBR, that will and should swiftly be ignored. No matter the agency or department, basically nothing in it will happen. There will not be cuts to NASA, Housing or State. There will not be an early Carrier retirement. There will not be cuts to education. None of it will happen. Not one line.
What will happen – and is happening – is Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell and McCarthy are already at work on the next two year budget deal, the third overall, that will take the country’s budget past the 2020 election and raise the debt ceiling / borrowing limit until 2021 as well. That moves them off the board for the election. We will then see, broadly, spending increases across the board for both defense and non-defense discretionary. This is exactly what happened in 2015 and in (after a CR) early 2018.
In short, who cares about the PBR? Who cares what the President wants. They haven’t had a seat at the table for years, and in the post-earmarks, post-Budget Control Act era, Congress has no incentive to give him one. They all get to issue their PBR political document, that amounts to absolutely nothing, and then they get to sign whatever the Budgetary Tetrarchy decides is going to be the shape of the next 2 year deal.
So really, March 12th when the White House dumps a work of fiction on everyone’s lap that no one in Congress will bother to read, instead of belly aching over cuts that will never happen in a million years, I’d go do something more productive. Like sorting a VHS collection of America’s Funniest Home Videos or something.
In the real world, anticipate another year of a modest budget boost to NASA, just like the last 5 budgets. Probably another 3 or 4%. Probably to $22.2 billion or something in that area.
NASA doesn’t seem to be able to do more with more money, so maybe less money will be the ticket. Good example is Orion-SLS, where they are spending billions and making little progress. By spending less on commercial crew having others build the hardware seems to making some progress.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new proposed NASA budget includes a $500 million increase over last year because of its lunar program.
https://www.wsj.com/article…
NASA’s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration
Proposed spending plan embodies White House directive for faster, more industry-driven human missions to the moon
By Andy Pasztor
Updated March 10, 2019 1:55 p.m. ET
“The Budget proposes to terminate the WFIRST mission.”
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
Penny wise, but pound foolish.
“The Budget proposes to terminate the WFIRST mission.”
Lots like Administrator Bridenstine is going to try to take out the SLS/Orion…
https://spacenews.com/nasa-…
NASA budget proposal targets SLS
by Jeff Foust — March 11, 2019
Updated 12:25 p.m. Eastern.
The budget cuts NASA by $481 million with SLS being cut by $375 million and Orion by $83 million, a total of $458 million of the $481 million reduction. The SLS Pork Masters are going to go ballistic over that.
Hard to see how that would do anything except move everything to the right, as they say.
But on the right the Starship/Super Heavy Lift is waiting to make a joke out of the SLS/Orion…
How is NASA going to justify sending astronauts around the Moon like Spam in a Can with the SLS/Orion after the Starship flies a couple dozen reporters and artists in comfort returning them to the the same spaceport they left from?