House Appropriations Hearing on Security at NASA and NASA's FY2015 Budget Request, April 2014

The Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing on NASA’s FY2015 budget request on April 8, 2014.  Breaking with tradition, the three-and-a-half hour hearing first discussed a different issue — a National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) report on security at NASA, especially access by foreign nationals to NASA centers.   The hearing then moved on to the NASA budget request and the hearing became quite combative between NASA Administrator Bolden and subcommittee members, especially subcommittee chairman Frank Wolf (R-VA).   SpacePolicyOnline.com published a summary of a hearing the same day and updated it on April 14 with comments made by Wolf at an unrelated hearing on April 9 where he said that “maybe everything was not as accurate as was said” the previous day.

Witnesses were:

• Richard Thornburgh, chairman of the NAPA committee (and former Attorney General, and former Governor of Pennsylvania)
• Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator