Democratic governor suggests the next Congressional election should be suspended

North Carolina Democratic governor Beverly Perdue suggested that the next Congressional election should be suspended.

I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.

I wonder why she really suggests this? Could it be because the Democrats are unpopular and risk losing more seats in 2012 than they lost in 2010?

No House Democrat will sponsor Obama’s job bill, preventing it from being introduced

Boy, does this tell us how politically weak Obama has become: No House Democrat will sponsor Obama’s job bill, preventing it from being introduced for consideration.

Correction: it turns out that a Democrat did finally introduce Obama’s jobs bill to the House, though it took until September 22, three weeks after the President’s speech first demanding that Congress “pass this bill immediately.”

Senate rejects House funding bill; shutdown looms

Senate rejects House funding bill; shutdown looms.

While we chatter about superficial election debates and a falling satellite, the federal budget continues to crash and burn. What I find disturbing about the events in the Senate is this quote:

Democrats in the Senate, who are in the majority, oppose Republican efforts to roll back “green” energy programs to pay for aid for victims of Hurricane Irene and other disasters. They say disaster aid, usually a bipartisan issue, should not require cuts elsewhere — especially to programs creating green jobs — as the GOP majority in the House now demands. [emphasis mine]

So how do the Democrats expect to pay for this disaster aid? Will the money grow on trees?

House unexpectedly defeats spending bill

The House unexpectedly defeated a spending bill today.

The bill would have funded the government at an annual rate of $1.043 trillion, in line with a bipartisan agreement reached in August. Many conservatives want to stick with the lower figure of $1.019 trillion that the House approved in April. The measure failed by a vote of 195 to 230, with 48 of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. The vote demonstrated the continued reluctance of Tea Party conservatives to compromise on spending issues, even as the public grows weary of repeated confrontation on Capitol Hill. [emphasis mine]

I have highlighted the last line of the quote above to illustrate an example of Reuters inserting its own political agenda into a story, based not on facts but on fantasy and leftwing wishful thinking. Not only is there no indication that the public is “weary of repeated confrontation,” polls and recent special elections suggest that the public is instead quite weary of politicians unwilling to cut the federal budget. It is for this reason these conservative Republicans feel so emboldened. They know the political winds are at their backs.

Senate panel trims NIH budget

Now for some good reporting: A Senate committee today approved an NIH budget that trimmed the health agency’s budget by $190 million.

This report actually gives us an accurate description of the proposed budget, which offers a 2012 budget of $30.5 billion compared to the $30.7 that NIH got in 2011. For further context, note that the 2012 budget is still more than the agency got in 2009 ($30.2 billion), and more than a billion above what it got in 2008 ($29.2 billion). Anyone who cries poverty at this budget cut immediately discredits themselves.

Senate appropriations committee has capped Webb Telescope budget

The Senate appropriations this week recommended capping the budget for the James Webb Space Telescope at $8 billion, less than the $8.7 billion that NASA now thinks is required to finish the telescope.

The committee also recommended a budget of $17.9 billion for NASA, about $1 billion less than the House recommendation and about a half billion less than NASA’s 2011 budget. If the Senate numbers are adopted, it would bring NASA’s budget back to the budget it received in 2008.

Another look at the cost of building NASA’s heavy lift rocket

Clark Lindsey takes another look at the cost for building the Congressionally-mandated heavy lift rocket, what NASA calls the Space Launch System and I call the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Key quote:

Finally, I’ll point out that there was certainly nothing on Wednesday that refuted the findings in the Booz Allen study that NASA’s estimates beyond the 3-5 year time frame are fraught with great uncertainty. Hutchison and Nelson claimed last week that since the near term estimates were reliable, there’s no reason to delay getting the program underway. That’s the sort of good governance that explains why programs often explode “unexpectedly” in cost after 3-5 years…

In other words, this is what government insiders call a “buy-in.” Offer low-ball budget numbers to get the project off the ground, then when the project is partly finished and the much higher real costs become evident, Congress will be forced to pay for it. Not only has this been routine practice in Washington for decades, I can instantly cite two projects that prove it:
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More bad budget reporting

Once again a journalist as well as a science journal are spinning budget numbers to hide the fact that the present Congress is not imposing draconian cuts to science. If anything, they are not cutting enough, considering the dire state of the federal deficit.

First there is the headline, from Science: Senate Panel Cuts NSF Budget by $162 Million. Then there is the article’s text, by Jeffrey Mervis, which not only reaffirms the cuts described in the headline but adds that “the equivalent House of Representatives panel approved a bill that would hold NSF’s budget steady next year at $6.86 billion.” Mervis then underlines how terrible he thinks these budget numbers are by quoting Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland): “We’ve gone beyond frugality and are into austerity.”

This reporting is shameful. Not only is Mikulski full of crap, Mervis’s description of the budget numbers is misleading if not downright wrong. Here are the final budget numbers for the NSF since 2007, in billions of dollars (sources: Science, the American Geological Institute, and The Scientist):
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Senate reinserts money for the James Webb Space Telescope

The Senate has reinstated money for completing the James Webb Space Telescope.

The allocation in today’s markup does not automatically mean that the Webb telescope has been rescued. The markup will now go to the full appropriations committee for approval before going to the Senate floor for a vote. The approved bill will then have to be reconciled with the House version, which, NASA hopes, will result in a final appropriation that keeps the telescope alive.

The House version also zeroed out funding for Webb, so reconciling the two budgets will not be easy.

Washington staffers fear pay cuts, layoffs, loss of perks

Well ain’t that a shame: Washington political staffers fear pay cuts, layoffs, and loss of perks. Some precious quotes:

“Salaries are essentially frozen and in some cases going down,” said one former senior House Democratic aide, who recently left the Hill. “That makes it very hard for some people to stay on the Hill and just promotes a culture of underappreciation.”

and

Many chiefs of staff have started with small office perks: water jugs, sodas and orange juice. One Republican lawmaker told POLITICO that aides now take up a collection because the office can’t afford coffee.

What prigs. The rest of the country is experiencing the highest unemployment and lowest income in decades, and they’re unhappy they don’t have a water cooler or coffee machine.

NASA to unveil its heavy-lift rocket design

Two stories, one from AP and the other from Florida Today, say that NASA will announce today the design of its heavy-lift rocket, mandated by Congress and estimated to cost around $35 billion. Here is NASA’s press release. To me, this is the key quote (from AP):

NASA figures it will be building and launching about one rocket a year for about 15 years or more in the 2020s and 2030s, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet made. The idea is to launch its first unmanned test flight in 2017 with the first crew flying in 2021 and astronauts heading to a nearby asteroid in 2025, the officials said. From there, NASA hopes to send the rocket and astronauts to Mars — at first just to circle, but then later landing on the Red Planet — in the 2030s. [emphasis mine]

In other words, after spending $1.7 on the National Space Plane, $1.2 billion on the X-33, $1 billion on the X-34, $800 million on the Space Launch Initiative, and finally, almost $10 billion on Constellation, none of which ever flew, NASA is now going to spend another $35 billion on a new rocket that won’t fly for at least another decade.

To be really blunt, this new rocket, like all its predecessors, will never fly either. It costs too much, will take too long to build, and will certainly be canceled by a future administration before it is finished. It is therefore a complete waste of money, and any Congress that approves it will demonstrate how utterly insincere they are about controlling spending.

A clarification: Some of the $35 billion mentioned above has already been spent for the Orion capsule. This however still does not change any of my conclusions.

House proposes trimming budget of FAA’s commercial space office

A House subcommittee has proposed trimming the budget of the FAA’s commercial space office from the $15.2 million it received in 2010 and 2011 to $13 million for 2012.

This is good, to my mind. Cutting their budget will pull the teeth from their regulatory efforts. As the commercial space industry ramps up, the political pressure on this office to approve permits will increase, and if they are short of cash they will have no choice but to keep things simple and say yes.

Update: Thanks to Joe2 for noting my error: the budget numbers above have been corrected to millions, not billions.

Senate approves a flat budget for the Department of Energy

The Senate has approved a flat budget for the Department of Energy.

On Wednesday the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4.843 billion for DOE’s Office of Science in 2012. That’s the same level as this year, and a slight bump over the $4.8 billion approved in July on a largely partisan vote by the House of Representatives covering the entire department. Although the funding is a far cry from the $5.416 billion that the Obama Administration had requested in February for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, officials at the Office of Science’s 10 national labs say they’re not complaining. “Even staying flat when a lot of other programs are getting cut is relatively good news,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In budgets, “flat is the new good,” quips Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. [emphasis mine]

That a government official is now happy that the budget is flat is a good sign that we might finally be making some cultural progress in terms of bringing the federal budget under some control. In the past the very thought of no increase would have sent these people into spasms of outrage. Now they realize how pointless such a tantrum would be, and might actually do their budget negotiations harm.

Senators lambast Administration for SLS budget numbers

The space war heats up: Two senators have issued a statement lambasting the Obama Administration for its budget numbers for building the program-formerly-called-Constellation.

All of this is fantasy and foolishness. These senators might succeed in forcing NASA to spend money on the heavy-lift rocket that Congress has mandated, but there is no way the space agency will ever get enough funding or time to finish it. Even if the lower estimates are right, the cost is exorbitant, many times that of what the private companies have spent for their rockets and ships. And if construction does begin in earnest, it cannot be finished before the arrival of a new President in 2016 (at the latest), who, like all new Presidents, will have his own plans and will not want to build something started by the previous administration.

Much better to end this farce and save the money, especially considering the debt of federal government.

Sticker shock over Congressionally designed rocket

The Obama administration has discovered that the cost to build the program-formerly-called-Constellation, required by Congress, is going to be far more than they can stomach.

White House budget officials increasingly are concerned that some of NASA’s manned-exploration plans may be unaffordable, especially as the space agency weighs options that would raise the cost by billions of dollars by speeding up the development of rockets and spacecraft, according to people familiar with the issue.

The cost concerns are coming to a head, these people said, as the White House Office of Management and Budget ratchets up questions about NASA’s proposed program in light of the current emphasis on deficit reduction.

None of this surprises me.
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Republican in the lead in special congressional election in New York

Oh my: A new poll shows the Republican is in the lead in the special election in New York to replace disgraced Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner.

If the Republican wins this election, in what has always been a Democratically-entrenched district in Brooklyn-Queens, it will send a clear signal to all that the 2012 election is going to be a very very very unusual election.

The space shuttle program officially ended on Wednesday

The space shuttle program officially ended on Wednesday. Note however:

Closeout of the shuttle program is an enormous effort expected to take two years. The program occupied 640 facilities and used more than 900,000 pieces of equipment with a value exceeding $12 billion, according to NASA. Much of the work will take place at Kennedy Space Center, where orbiters have been maintained and prepared for launch. NASA requested $89 million for shuttle transition and retirement work in the 2012 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, but Congress has not yet approved a budget.

The immediate consequences of the Progress freighter failure

The immediate consequences of the Progress freighter failure:

The longer term consequences? Congress will anguish over the lack of a shuttle. Some will demand more money for the program-formerly-called-Constellation, while others will demand more money for the new commercial companies. In either case, they will ignore the reality of a bankrupt federal government that simply can’t afford either at the moment.

NASA’s costs estimates too low for Congress’s heavy-lift rocket

Surprise, surprise! An independent analysis of NASA’s budget estimates to build Congress’s heavy-lift rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation, are untrustworthy and likely low.

“All three program estimates assume large, unsubstantiated, future cost efficiencies leading to the impression that they are optimistic,” the team said in its key findings. A risk assessment revealed the funding reserves projected for all three programs are insufficient, according to Booz Allen Hamilton. NASA has not disclosed its internal cost estimate for the Space Launch System. “Due to procurement of items still in development and large cost risks in the out years, NASA cannot have full confidence in the estimates for long-term planning,” the executive summary said.

This project is nothing more than Congressional pork. It will never get built. Sadly, it might waste a lot of money before it never gets built.

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