4 Jan 2011, Tuesday, Rocket News: What Deficit?

BuffaloNews.com: What Deficit?
by News Editorial Board

Is it too much to ask? Can our elected representatives in Washington make even a game attempt to avoid obscene wastes of taxpayer money? The latest outrage centers on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration being forced to continue its defunct Ares I rocket program, at least until March. The extension squanders nearly $500 million, according to one estimate. But in Washington, it's only money.

Development of the Ares I, a would-be element of NASA's once-vaunted Constellation program, will continue for at least a couple of more months, even though a blue-ribbon panel of space scientists, engineers and astronauts determined in October 2009 that Constellation could not deliver on its promise of sending astronauts back to the moon. The panel also deemed the Ares I rocket a particularly wasteful element.

But Ares I development contracts are scattered around a few states and congressional districts, so Congress got all jittery about ending development outright, even before the blue-ribbon panel presented its report to the White House.

To protect jobs at the Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state of Alabama, Republican Sen. Richard Shelby inserted a 70-word sentence into the federal budget adopted in 2009 for fiscal 2010. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the sentence barred NASA from shutting down Ares I until Congress passed a new budget a year later.

Alas, Congress never did pass a federal budget for fiscal 2011. Instead, it has kept the government running through a series of budget extensions. The latest keeps the 2010 budget, which should have expired Sept. 30, in effect until March, so NASA continues to abide by the Shelby sentence. According to the Sentinel, that means NASA must keep paying contractors to build the Ares I even though President Obama long ago signed a NASA plan to cancel the Constellation program begun under President George W. Bush.

NASA has said it spends $95 million a month on Ares I. At that rate, it will have spent about $475 million from Oct. 1 to March on the rocket to nowhere.

Shelby months ago went on the offensive to decry Obama's decision to cancel NASA's move toward further moon exploration. He called it "the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight." In reality, the senator was probably upset about the death of a future U.S. human employment program in his home state.

In a sense, Shelby is the ideal senator to depict congressional hypocrisy on how it spends our money. The Democrat-turned-Republican demonstrates that party doesn't matter when it comes to milking the federal cow.

For all their justifiable complaining about the budget deficit, Republicans are remarkably like Democrats when jobs are on the line -- even expensive, unnecessary jobs. Deficits don't matter so much when an election can be lost.

The words of a group that monitors government lard hit the mark. Citizens Against Government Waste gave Shelby its "Porker of the Month" award for his continued efforts to protect Ares I through legislation.

"Americans are being forced to tighten their belts and the economy is limping along, but that doesn't deter the porkers in Congress, like Sen. Shelby, who are still spending and rewarding government contractors orbiting the program," the group's president, Tom Schatz, said at the time. "Sen. Shelby's actions just perpetuate the notion that politicians in Washington are living on a completely different planet."