Congress' pet projects take $3 billion from budget
By John Kelly
USA Today
June 12, 2006
NASA must slash science, engineering and education programs to pay for billions of dollars in congressional pet projects, most of which have little to do with the agency's mission to explore space.
The price tag for politicians' "pork" has grown so large that NASA may have to delay the new spaceships and rockets needed to replace the space shuttles, to be retired in 2010.
Instead, NASA will pay for:
•Construction or renovation of dozens of museums, planetariums and science labs for colleges.
•Computers, classrooms and lab space for colleges and schools across the U.S.
•A website and laboratory for the Gulf of Maine Aquarium.
•A sprawling headquarters building for a non-profit research group in West Virginia created by U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan. The Democrat is now subject of a broader congressional ethics probe.
Since 2001, Congress has directed the space agency to spend more than $3 billion on special projects, most of them small endeavors sought by individual lawmakers for the benefit of their home districts, according to NASA and congressional records.
"There is a real consequence to this. It's not a victimless crime," said David Williams, a vice president of the independent watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, which has complained for years about the number and cost of the pet projects.
The cost of congressional add-ins has grown to about a half-billion dollars a year, or five times the total of a decade ago.
The consequences are growing too, NASA says. The agency gets no extra money in its roughly $16 billion-a-year budget to fund politicians' local projects, so managers must redirect money from existing projects.
What could go:
•Robotic space probes face delay or cancellation as NASA tries to shuffle money.
•The shuttles, International Space Station and new vehicles to carry astronauts back to the moon could see budget cuts. The last item is one NASA is now stressing to members of Congress.
•Education programs are being cut, including half of the funding for the agency program that helps ensure historically minority colleges and universities are represented in NASA projects and grant programs.
"I am deeply concerned that the growth of these unrequested congressional directions is eroding NASA's ability to carry out its mission of space exploration and peer-reviewed scientific discovery," NASA Administrator Mike Griffin wrote this year in a letter the House Science Committee. The cost, he went on to say, "could conflict with NASA's ability to strive to deliver the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) by the earliest possible date following the 2010 retirement of the space shuttle."
Griffin's plea
Already, there is a four-year gap between the shuttles' retirement and the first flight of the replacement ships. The transition is projected to cut the number of jobs at Kennedy Space Center from 15,000 to about 10,000 unless leaders can land extra space work beyond launch and landing operations. Any delay in fielding the new fleet could make matters worse.
So, Griffin is imploring Congress to ease up on pet projects, and he has some influential allies on Capitol Hill.
"It's draining NASA's lifeblood," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando, the only active member of Congress to have flown in space. "Every dollar is needed for research and development and safety. I just don't think it's right for crazy things to be put in there like planetariums in other states.. .. It's destructive to take money out of the NASA budget to squirrel it away for pet projects of members of Congress simply because they can get their fingers on it."
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a potential presidential candidate and chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, railed against earmarks in the NASA budget during the investigation of the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts. McCain said money used to pay for politicians' pet projects would be better spent on safety measures to reduce the chance of such accidents.
It's unclear, however, if anything will change.
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to decide how the federal government spends its money. It also requires elected lawmakers to represent the people back home.
U.S. Rep. David Weldon, R-Indialantic, has earmarked money in the NASA budget for hand-picked projects in Brevard, Florida. He has landed several million dollars for Florida Tech, the Space Life Sciences Lab at Kennedy Space Center and hydrogen fuel research. Weldon defends his projects as well-connected to NASA's overall mission.
"There is a nexus of priorities with those," said Stuart Burns, the congressman's deputy chief of staff. "That is what Dr. Weldon has used to weigh earmark requests he has made. But you can look at some of this other stuff and, we agree, you sit there and scratch your head figuring out how it belongs."
Florida has landed a small number of NASA earmarks — about 20 — during the last decade. They include money Weldon secured to accelerate badly needed roof repairs at the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, where shuttles are assembled for flight. They also include money that other members of the Florida delegation nabbed for construction and research projects at colleges and universities across the state.
Some of the largest projects inserted into NASA's budget include big-ticket missions or programs that the agency tried to cancel, but that Congress decided should not be cut. Two examples: reinstatement of funding for a shuttle rescue mission to Hubble Space Telescope and a recently launched probe bound for Pluto.
However, most are hometown projects for members of Congress.
Hometown projects
Citizens Against Government Waste, in preparing its annual "Pig Book" of pork-barrel projects, does not count projects such as Hubble and the Pluto mission. The reasoning: That is Congress exercising its authority to help guide agency priorities.
Still, the organization's book notes $2 billion worth of the mostly non-space hometown projects.
"Certainly, there've been some earmarks that probably should not have been in there," Burns said.
That's one of the reasons Weldon is pushing for the president to have line-item veto power, allowing him to strike individual projects added by Congress.
Sean O'Keefe, the previous NASA administrator, tried to fight against pet projects. O'Keefe, who left in 2005 to become chancellor of Louisiana State University, blamed managers inside NASA as much as lawmakers. Some of those managers, facing budget cuts, seek out supportive lawmakers to get their projects reinstated, O'Keefe said in one of his last speeches at NASA. In responding to that, lawmakers are merely doing their jobs, he said.
The earmarks, with Congress making the decisions, "is absolute chaos with no oversight," said Williams, the taxpayer group's vice president.
"There is zero ability for anyone to see what's happening when these things get added at the last minute with no debate," he said.
