Was NASA science funding redirected for party political purposes leading up to the 2004 or 2006 elections?
There is a slowly growing flap over White House political operatives giving briefings to government agencies on election vulnerabilities and how to move funding to boost some local candidates and hurt others.
TPM reports that "oddly" NASA was included in the briefings
This is interesting for two reasons: one is that more than one high level civil service staffer at NASA HQ was summarily dismissed and, in at least one case, escorted off-premises, during or immediately after meetings with political appointees. I have not heard exactly what prompted the dismissals, except that on at least one occasion it was because a division head refused to re-allocate funding as directed.
In and of itself that could just be a matter of disagreeing with policy priorities. NBD.
But, there has been this other persistent puzzle, where funding was clearly geographically correlated: in particular a lot of JPL and Ames project were, apparently, capriciously cut, with no apparent regard for science, while certain other NASA projects hosted south of the Mason-Dixon line seemed to get new or additional funding, again in a manner apparently orthogonal to stated science priorities.
I always thought it was personal - a matter of internal agency priorities - except that I had heard from a reliable source that part of the hit on JPL was their "crime" of inviting Al Gore to one of the Mars Rover landing parties.
But, I may have been wrong, and that this was a top down directed policy, from above NASA HQ levels, and part of a government wide program to distort funding allocations away from priority selection to politically directed allocations.
There is always some element of this, but if the speculation above is even half true than a big fat red line has been crossed.
Not a good way to run a country folks.
original WaPo story - hmph "informational briefings about the political landscape" - well, that's ok then.
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The money is going to manned spaceflight, which brought us Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, the Shuttle, and the ISS -- which cost unbelievable fortunes for very little science return. We know that astronauts proved obsolete in the 60s, and that robotic spacecraft were the only way to go.
The trouble is, the huge corporations who brought us manned spaceflight do not want to give up the money. They'll give their support to the neocon agenda in return for unbelievable fortunes. To pay for revenue hikes for the rich necessitates slashing funding for the needy.
Sound familiar?
This is small potatoes. The more serious funding issue at NASA is the manned travel junkets to the moon and Mars, which are sucking money away from real science programs, which just happen to include earth climate studies that could reinforce the global warming bandwagon. Just a coincidence, I'm sure (wink wink nudge nudge)
It is relatively small amounts, but there is a principle at stake.
I think it is clear that both the White House and the Congress can set policy priorities for NASA. eg they can declare that Exploration is a priority over Science - Congress can do so explicitly by appropriating lines of funding within the agency, the White House can do so through requests to Congress and by using what discretion they have within the budget to move funding around. Congress has additional discretion to either do line appropriaton, or to grant the executive the discretion to move funding around to suit their priorities.
One can debate whether they ought to mess with the funding, and whether Science is priority over Exploration, but either way is their right and their duty to set the policy priorities.
But, within those priorities, in democracies run under rule of law, one expects the detailed appropriation to follow the interests of the nation: note that this does not mean just giving all the funding to the one best science project or place best for doing science - as policy, the interest of the nation can include regional development, spreading resources geographically or other non-science optimal strategies.
But, generally in a modern nation that claims to follow rule of law and governance in the interest of the nation, you do not expect micromanagement of projects with explicit party political purposes. This is a bit naive, there is always some jostling by party hacks to show return to the punters, but civil service run agencies should decouple from the party process at some middle level and follow policy priorities and national interest, not this year's priority for a political party at the local level.
More to the point, it is illegal for an agency like NASA to do so.