WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- As the NASA budget grinds through the spending-bill process in the Senate, the top Democrat managing the bill accused the House of setting up the NASA budget cuts for political strategy.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), the ranking member on the Senate VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, said she thinks the House subcommittee targeted NASA cuts at programs run out of Goddard Space Flight Center -- knowing she wouldn't stand for it because the center is in her state.
The House committee "focused most of the cuts in my state," Mikulski said during her opening comments. "I don't take it personally. But it certainly seemed convenient to them, knowing I was the ranking member of the committee and would mount a rescue mission for the cuts in my state."
The Senate version of the bill fully funds NASA at $13.6 billion, unlike the House version, which included over $900 million in cuts to the space agency. Goddard would be the hardest hit of the fifteen NASA centers under the House plan, losing $267 million in programs.
The Republican leadership has been struggling to find all the money it needs to fund the 13 spending bills that contain the collective budget for the entire national government. Having pledged not to touch money for Social Security or its planned $792 billion tax cut, the GOP has been forced to slash the allocations in some of the spending bills until it can find a solution.
The House version of the VA-HUD bill was particularly under-funded. Rather than cut veterans' benefits or public housing, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. James Walsh (R-New York) instead chose to cut NASA and the National Science Foundation.
The dispute over the VA-HUD bill has turned into a rivalry between the two chambers of Congress, not just between the political parties. Mikulski's Republican counterpart, subcommittee chairman Sen. Kit Bond (R-Missouri) said it was "inevitable" that if the House cut the earth science programs at Goddard, Mikulski would restore them.
"I think we're seeing the legislative equivalent of Newton's second law," Bond said on the floor. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Bond called Mikulski an "effective advocate for her side" during the informal negotiations before the Senate bill was written.
During the initial drafting of the bill, it was also a Republican who had the most sarcastic comment on the House version of the bill. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) called the NASA cuts "a present from the House" for the Senate committee to deal with.
But some Democrats in the Senate may vote against the VA-HUD bill to protest the Republican leadership's method of solving the problem: they took $7 billion from the bill funding labor, health, and education programs to give to the VA-HUD bill.
A spokesman for Walsh declined to answer Mikulski's specific charges, and said, "I would just restate our goal: to work within the parameters we were given in the most effective way we can."
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