WASHINGTON - No matter how much over budget or how far behind schedule the International Space Station falls, Congress has avoided imposing discipline on NASA's crown jewel.
Even now, four months after the Bush administration ordered a dramatic downsizing of the station to avert $4 billion in projected extra costs, Congress has done little to hold the agency or itself accountable.
Special interests, institutional inertia and politics are to blame, critics say.
"I believe some people get on these committees not to diligently perform oversight as much as to promote jobs and contracts in their districts," said Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., whose signature issue during 12 years in the House has been to eliminate the station. "I would give Congress an 'F.' "
FLORIDA TODAY interviews with top Republicans and Democrats on NASA oversight committees found few willing to accept responsibility for the space station's spending woes.
"The House of Representatives did its job," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wisc., former chairman of the House Science Committee. "It was the Senate that dropped the ball."
During most of the 1990s, Sensenbrenner criticized the Clinton administration's handling of the space station and the dysfunctional partnership it struck with the Russian Space Agency. Sensenbrenner regularly held public hearings where he berated NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and other agency officials. But the bluster never translated into discipline or pain for the civilian space agency.
After years of indifference, the Senate finally agreed to a NASA authorization bill last year setting limits on space station spending.
Two senators most often cited for opposing legislation that would have brought discipline to the space station project are Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
Shelby's home state hosts Marshall Space Flight Center where some station components are fabricated and assembled.
"Many of us have encouraged NASA to get its house in order in preparation for funding shortfalls in this program," Shelby said in a written statement.
Hutchison, a champion of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the space station project is managed, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
The General Accounting Office - the investigative arm of Congress - sent at least 16 reports to lawmakers, some as early as 1994, warning that the space station project suffered from poor management, budget cuts, weak performance by contractors, Russian delays and other factors.
House members and senators never flexed their authority to force NASA to build - on time and on budget - the grand orbiting research facility the agency promised it could produce.
"Congress isn't made up of scientists," said Alise Frye, director of the National Security Project at Taxpayers for Common Sense. "What this comes down to is contractors selling a bill of goods. They always say it will cost less and take less time and taxpayers get caught holding the bag."
One lawmaker willing to accept responsibility is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee.
"We can't just blame the Russians and NASA," Rohrabacher said. "We could have worked a little closer with the Clinton administration and followed the decisions as they were being made rather than after they were made."
Others disagree.
Short of creating a staff of shadow managers to monitor NASA, there is little Congress could have done to influence the executive branch agency, said Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Palm Bay, whose district hosts Kennedy Space Center.
"I don't know what more someone like me could have done except ignore my responsibilities as a congressman and go over to the space station office and pore over the books day after day," Weldon said.
The congressional committee system also is part of the problem, observers said.
The House Science Committee suffers from significant turnover. Just 10 of its current 45 members have been on the panel since 1993 when the space station was redesigned.
Some of the panel's most active members aren't inclined to come down hard on NASA or the aerospace contractors who provide good jobs back home.
"We're not responsible for micromanaging NASA," said Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas. "We're responsible for having a vision and creating policy."
The other influential panel, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies, is too small and too busy to focus much attention on space.
Its chairman, Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y., makes no secret that the civilian space agency is not his top priority.
"Congress is not very well organized to oversee long-term, complex, high technology programs," said John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "The Founding Fathers did not design our political system for efficiency and probably did not contemplate the government undertaking activities of the sort as the exploration of space."
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2001 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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