WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- House Science Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) sent a letter to NASA on Thursday urging the agency to make a "painless" policy change by transporting high-level staff on commercial airlines instead of buying new business jets.
But NASA disagreed with the idea. The agency maintains commercial airlines would cause scheduling problems, and refuses to give up using -- and making more of -- its own craft.
Sensenbrenners letter -- addressed to NASA administrator, Dan Goldin -- said NASA was "ignoring" a late September NASA Inspector General (IG) report that recommended the agency stop using its NASA-3 planes to carry personnel to meetings, conferences and sites. The agency would save taxpayers $44 million by not replacing three NASA-3 jets with four new ones, and upgrading another, the report said.
"Im confident the commercial aviation means used by the public would allow NASAs management to continue doing its job but at significantly lower cost to the taxpayer," Sensenbrenner said in the letter.
He echoed another Inspector General finding, that the space agency's use of NASA-3 jets for its management violated an Office of Management and Budget rule that says agencies must use commercial carriers.
"The government negotiates contract fares with all of the major airlines," Sensenbrenner told States News Service and space.com. "The NASA big shots ought to do what is required of everybody else, including cabinet secretaries."
NASA officials contacted for this story refused to comment on Sensenbrenners letter until the administrator looks at it.
But in the IG report, the agency refused to use commercial airlines, arguing that they are not flexible enough. It also maintained its own management planes are important for its missions.
"The [NASA-owned] aircraft allow us to schedule and conduct business at multiple sites, often within the course of a day or two, something that is impossible to accomplish with commercial airlines," the associate administrator for Management Services Jeffrey Sutton, wrote in a September 27 letter to the IG. "Mission Management Aircraft provide us the capability to meet urgent requirements and to be prepared to meet contingencies associated with all of NASAs missions."
Sensenbrenner disagreed.
"NASAs mission is not to transport people," he said. "I do not like to see monies that could be used for [research and development] frittered away on providing more convenient transportation to people who simply dont like to march through airports because it's beneath them."
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