By Bart Jansen
Gannett Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to take $298 million away from NASA and spend it on local policing.
The vote was 228-203. Reps. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, and Sandy Adams, R-Orlando, opposed the switch, an amendment to a stopgap spending bill that would keep the government running for the rest of this fiscal year.
The debate over the amendment drafted by Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York illustrates the difficulties that lie ahead in deciding how much to spend on NASA and other agencies.
Weiner’s amendment would eliminate a fund that NASA taps to work with other agencies and use the money to hire more community-oriented police officers.
“I want to go see Mars, too, but I’d much rather have cops on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens,” he said.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., called the NASA fund a “slush fund.”
Weiner’s amendment angered NASA supporters. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said that if it’s approved by the Senate and signed into law, it would cost 1,500 to 2,000 NASA jobs.
Wednesday’s vote is an example of the challenges lawmakers face in deciding which priorities to approve while making wide-ranging budget cuts.
“We’re figuring out which diminished amount we’re going to take from to restore another diminished amount,” Weiner said.
The House is expected to vote Thursday on the overall spending bill, which would cut spending on NASA by $303 million.
President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill over cuts that he said would “sharply undermine core government functions and investments key to economic growth and job creation.”
Senate Democrats also oppose the bill’s $61 billion in proposed spending cuts across the entire government.
The Senate and House have until March 4, when a current stopgap sending bill expires, to agree on spending through Sept. 30. Otherwise, the government could shut down.
“Many of the recommendations in this bill resulted from a meat-cleaver approach to budget cuts, when we should be using a scalpel - responsibly identifying specific programs that are wasteful or unneeded,” said Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who heads the Appropriations Committee.
House conservatives such as Posey and Adams want NASA to stop spending money on climate-change research and spend it instead on space exploration. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, drafted - but later withdrew - an amendment to the spending bill that aimed to shift $517 million from climate research to exploration.
“In this tight budget cycle, we must reduce duplicative spending and target our resources where they will be most beneficial,” Olson said. “The 15 other agencies conducting climate research can pick up the slack while freeing up resources for NASA to make a truly unique contribution - maintaining U.S. dominance in human space flight.”
Adams said tens of thousands of jobs depend on NASA’s commitment to space exploration.
“At a time when unemployment is at 12 percent in Florida and 9 percent nationwide and our country is facing trillion-dollar deficits, I believe that limited federal funds are better invested in NASA’s human space flight program, not climate-change research,” Adams said.
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