Mikulski Announces Retirement

Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) announced today that this will be her last term in the Senate.   One of NASA and NOAA’s strongest supporters, her departure in 2016 will mark the end of an era.

Mikulski is currently the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and on its Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee that funds NASA and NOAA.  In the last Congress, when Democrats controlled the Senate, she chaired both the full committee and the subcommittee, the first woman to hold the Appropriations gavel at the full committee level on either side of Capitol Hill.

There is little doubt that her strong support of the civil space program is founded on the location of major space companies and government agencies in her home state of Maryland.   NOAA headquarters is in Silver Spring, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is in Greenbelt, and Lockheed Martin is headquartered in Bethesda to name a few.   NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is in neighboring Virginia on the DelMarVa (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) peninsula, but many of its workers live in Maryland and Wallops is managed by Goddard Space Flight Center.  Mikulski herself jokes that when someone comes to her asking for funding she asks three questions: “What does this do for the Nation?,” “What does this do for Maryland?,” and “What did you say again this does for Maryland”?

Her support is not unconditional, however.  She has been one of NOAA’s harshest critics over the years on its management of weather satellite programs after the NPOESS overruns that led to its cancellation and early indications that the successor JPSS program was headed in the same direction.  Just last week she sternly told Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at a hearing on the FY2016 NOAA budget request that she would be closely watching the Department’s management of JPSS and the Polar Follow On program NOAA is requesting this year.  She also called NASA to task for the skyrocketing overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) several years ago and demanded an independent review (the Casani report), which led to a development cost cap of $8 billion set by law.  The agreement seems to have sealed her support and last year she enthusiastically told an audience at Goddard Space Flight Center (where JWST is managed) that “I saved you from the Tea Party.“

This is her fifth term in the Senate, which followed a decade in the House of Representatives representing Baltimore, MD.  She was the first Democratic woman Senator elected to the Senate in her own right and one of only two women in the Senate when she took office there in 1987.  Today, there are 20.  She is the longest serving woman in the U.S. Congress.   In announcing her retirement among her constituents in East Baltimore today, she said she had thought long and hard about how she wanted to spend the next two years “fighting to keep my job or fighting for your job,”  “raising money or raising hell to meet your day-to-day needs,”  “focusing on my election or the next generation.”  She said she chose “to give you 120 percent of my time with all of my energy focused on you and your future.”

Although her passion is serving her constituents, she also seems to be genuinely interested in NASA’s science programs in particular.  For the past several years she has been paired with Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) on the CJS subcommittee, an advocate of human spaceflight, giving NASA a strong foundation of support across its portfolio on that crucially important panel.   Her departure two years from now will leave quite a void,