Revised House Appropriations Proposal Cuts NASA More Deeply

The House Appropriations Committee let another shoe drop today with its revised cuts to domestic discretionary spending in the latest version of a Continuing Resolution (CR) to tund the government for the rest of FY2011. The CR is written as a revision of the FY2011 appropriations for the Department of Defense.

The committee’s first proposal issued on Wednesday would have cut $379 million from NASA’s FY2011 request, and a total of $74 billion from the President’s overall FY2011 request for domestic discretionary spending. Tea Party Republicans demanded that the cut be $100 billion, however, and the appropriations committee was forced to propose deeper cuts. The new proposal would cut the $100 billion overall from the FY2011 request, of which $578.7 million is from NASA’s FY2011 request of $19.0 billion. The following statement was made by the committee with regard to NASA, as well as NOAA’s satellite activities:

“The bill includes necessary funding increases in two areas: to prevent some work stoppage on NOAA’s weather satellite program that will help protect Americans from weather-related natural disasters, and to prevent deficiencies in federal detention and incarceration programs. The CR also provides budget flexibility within overall reduced funding levels to allow the Department of Justice to meet high-priority requirements and NASA to carry out its authorized activities.”

What that actually means programmatically is difficult to ascertain. Parsing the language of the bill is challenging.