Trade-off da – gdi 2011 1 Earth Science D/A 2

Link—Out-of-NASA T/Off

To pay for those priorities, Holdren says, agencies were asked to make the painful determination of which programs were underperforming or of lower priority to the president’s national objective “to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” “I think it is especially encouraging to have a president who really supports R&D and education,” says Albert Teich, who directs science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. “You wish every president saw things this way. What’s discouraging, of course, is that we face this huge deficit. And not everybody in Congress is going to agree with the president’s priorities. So there’s bound to be fights over it.” How big a tussle? “That’s the question of the hour. And for the answer, I think you should ask the IBM computer on Jeopardy this week,” Teich says. This “zero-sum game” for federal R&D budgeting is novel, Teich notes. It is also virtually impossible to achieve, he adds, since a host of different congressional committees are responsible for eventually drafting the spending bills that will determine how money will be apportioned for individual agencies. And they don’t coordinate their spending plans to allow such a finely balanced ledger.

Link—Out-of-NASA T/Off

It’s not posted yet on the committee’s web site, but the full House Science Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, March 2, on NASA’s FY12 budget request. NASA administrator Charles Bolden is the sole witness scheduled to testify. Last week the Senate Commerce Committee announced the chairs and ranking members of its subcommittees. To no one’s surprise, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) will return as chairman of the science and space subcommittee. The committee’s new ranking member is freshman Sen. John Boozman (R-AR). However, it’s likely that full committee ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) will continue to play a major role in any space topics during this Congress. Last week the full House approved an amendment to its 2011 continuing resolution to transfer nearly $300 million from NASA to a Justice Department community policing program. The amendment was introduced by a Democrat, but passed thanks to the votes of 70 Republicans, who joined 158 Republicans to approve the amendment. So what was the reaction of Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)? He blames the Obama Administration: “If the White House had argued for NASA among House Democrats, we would have protected NASA from this cut,” he told the Huntsville Times. Of course, if those 70 Republicans hadn’t voted for it, the amendment wouldn’t have passed regardless of what the Democrats did, as the GOP is now in the majority, but Brooks offers no explanation why 70 of his fellow House Republicans voted for the amendment.

But more broadly, Congress isn't going to go for all of these things. Congress, as you'll talk about later with NASA, is not going to be happy with that reallocation and savings. And the reason that's important to the rest of the science budget is because NASA is funded by the same committee that funds the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce, which has NOAA and NIST. And so if they have a fixed amount of money, the more they give to one agency, the less there is for everybody else. So sometimes Congress makes decisions not because they're opposed to research, but because they have other higher priorities.