NASA Chief Acquisition Officer on Sequestration
Sequestration Message from the Office of the Chief Acquisition Officer
“At this time, NASA is taking every step to mitigate the effects of these cuts, but based on our initial analysis, it is possible that your contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or Space Act agreement may be affected. In addition, planned actions for new and existing work may be re-scoped, delayed, or canceled depending on the nature of the work and the degree to which it directly supports the Agency’s mission goals. To the extent that your contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or Space Act agreement is affected due to these budget cuts, you will be contacted by your Contracting, Agreement or Grant Officer with additional details.”
Bring back the great generation. Please!
I’m confused, which I admit is becoming my default state. This missive, along with the apparent SLS/Orion immunity claims, indicates a lot more leeway in distributing the cuts than one would think from the “across the board” descriptions used in the common media. By what authority are these exemptions possible?
I’m also curious about the language of the original sequester bill. The budgets have specific language directing money to specific programs and that language is the law, does the sequester law take precedence over that? In other words, is the detail of the budget within an agency now in the hands of the Administration. In which case, a) wouldn’t this be a good way to shut down a lot of pork that Dems don’t want and only agreed to get Rep votes. And b) wouldn’t that be a good way to get Reps to take negotiations a bit more seriously?
[For example, suspending a certain really big rocket program in order to prevent cuts to science (and accelerate commercial crew), or even using the opportunity to reform SLS along the lines of an entirely external acquisition (ie, COTS), instead on an internal flagship program.]
It’s “across the board” only at the OMB Account level. For NASA, this means 8.2% cuts (from FY13 request, not FY12 levels) in Space Operations, Science, Cross Agency Support, Exploration, Aeronautics, Education, Construction, and Space Technology. There is considerable leeway for exempting programs within each of these categories.