About that NSF Budget Cut
December 6th, 2004Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
The Washington Post reports today,
“Without a separate vote or even a debate, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) has managed to deliver to a delighted NASA enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come. President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration,” which would send humans to the moon and eventually to Mars, got a skeptical reception in January and was left for dead in midsummer, but it made a stunning last-minute comeback when DeLay delivered NASA’s full $16.2 billion budget request as part of the omnibus $388 billion spending bill passed Nov. 20.”
Why is this important? NASA and NSF both sit in the VA-HUD Appropriations subcommittee and consequently must share a common slice of the federal budgetary pie (along with Veterans Administration and Housing and Urban Development). According to today’s Post article Representative DeLay, whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was responsible for increasing NASA’s budget from $15.9 billion to $16.2 billion, an increase of $300 million. By contrast, NSF saw its budget cut by $105 million. You can do the math.
This indicates that the NSF cuts were the necessary result of political priority-setting across competing science agencies, and not because money was siphoned off to Punxsutawney Phil or any other of the less plausible interpretations that have been advanced over the past week.
As I wrote in October, “after a decade of record increases it seems unlikely that claims of crisis, balance, or proportional benefit will avoid intra-S&T conflicts resulting from stagnant budgets.”