The Perils of Presidential Leadership on Space Policy:

The Politics of Congressional Budgeting for NASA, 1958-2008

Richard S. Conley

Associate Professor

Department of Political Science

University of Florida

234 Anderson Hall

Gainesville, FL 32611

(352) 273-2385

Wendy Whitman Cobb

PhD Candidate

University of Florida

330 Anderson Hall

Gainesville, FL 32611

This study takes a sharp focus on presidential-congressional relations on appropriations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This research is the first to attempt to quantify the factors that drive congressional responses to presidential budget requests for space policy spanning fiscal years 1959-2009. The analysis accentuates NASA’s exceptional situation in the budgeting process as an agency without a core social or geographic constituency, the impact of congressional budget reforms of the 1970s, and presidents’ relative inattention to space policy since the agency’s inception in 1958. The theoretical basis for the quantitative analysis also draws from perspectives that include domestic economic factors, international contexts, and the congressional electoral cycle. The empirical analysis accentuates the difficulties of presidential leadership on NASA budget politics and the basis for congressional dominance over the agency’s funding while highlighting the broader implications for theories of executive and legislative budget politics in “tertiary” policy areas.

Keywords: Congress, Presidency, budget, space policy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(NASA)

1

“Lit up with anticipation, we arrive at the launching site

The sky is still dark, nearing dawn, on the Florida coastline

Circling choppers slash the night, with roving searchlight beams

This magic day when super-science mingles with the bright stuff of dreams…”

Rush, “Countdown,” Signals (1982)

It is more than an irony that nearly three decades ago it was an iconic Canadian rock group that celebrated the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) space shuttle program. The lyrics of the song have now become an appropriate eulogy for a program that once stirred extraterrestrial reveries and captivated universal human imagination across the globe—at times seemingly more abroad than in America itself. The “bright stuff of dreams” propelled by solid rocket fuel faded into history on May 14, 2010 when the shuttle Atlantis made its final voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) with little media fanfare. Atlantis, like its counterparts Endeavour and Discovery, is likely to become a museum relic of a bygone era.

With the impending retirement of the space shuttle fleet and the recent scrapping by both President Obama and the Congress of the shuttle’s replacement program, Constellation, NASA finds itself in a precarious position. The agency has been plagued by questions of administrative inefficiency, cost overruns, pressures to privatize and commercialize space flight, and high profile shuttle disasters including Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) from which it has arguably never fully recovered. Congressional policymakers’ ambivalence towards NASA has been compounded by most presidents’ ambiguity in their definition of, and relative commitment to the agency’s objectives since the Apollo era.

NASA’s challenges are clearly evident in budgetary politics between the branches and within Congress. Since the creation of NASA under President Eisenhower in 1958 and President Kennedy’s urgent challenge before a joint session of Congress in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade, NASA’s annual budget has remained relatively flat at an average of $15.7 billion since 1970.[1] But there is much more to the story. With the exception of just three years since the agency was created—1959, 1961, and 1987—inflation-adjusted congressional appropriations for NASA have fallen below presidents’ requests by an average of $1.6 billion (s.d.=$1 billion). The mismatch between NASA’s long-term programmatic commitments and the congressional appropriations process could not be more palpable for the success or failure of the agency’s programs. Continual under-funding of the agency has historically jeopardized NASA’s ability to engage in strategic, long-term planning for the implementation of human spaceflight and other large-scale programs (DalBello 1989, 80). “All too often,” Paxton (2006, 11) asserts, “ NASA, in response to external factors (ranging from Congressional earmarks to budget cuts in program elements) is unable to meet its commitments for funding and unable to control costs due to a lack of sufficient programmatic insight and an unwillingness to prevent changes in scope in the mission design.”

The following questions naturally arise. Why have presidents not taken a greater interest in NASA’s mission since the moon landing? And why, with few exceptions, have presidents been willing to allow Congress to chop NASA’s budget by as much as $3-4 billion from their annual requests? One reason is that since the Apollo era space policy has not been a political priority on the national agenda at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue (Johnson-Freese 2004, 80; Logsdon 2003, 80). Another, as many scholars argue, is that presidential leadership on space policy has generally been highly exaggerated, rhetorically symbolic, and lacking in substance (Launius and McCurdy 1997).

Presidential-congressional relations on NASA appropriations represent an intriguing case of budget politics that warrants greater scrutiny. This research is the first to attempt to quantify the factors that drive congressional responses to presidential budget requests for space policy spanning fiscal years 1959-2009. The analysis accentuates NASA’s exceptional situation in the budgeting process as an agency without a core social or geographic constituency, the impact of congressional budget reforms of the 1970s, and presidents’ relative inattention to space policy since the agency’s inception. The theoretical basis for the quantitative analysis also draws from perspectives that include domestic economic factors, international contexts, and the congressional electoral cycle. As such, the empirical analysis highlights the broader implications for theories of executive and legislative budget politics in “tertiary” policy areas.

The analysis unfolds in several stages. The next section briefly reviews NASA’s precarious position in the congressional budget process as institutional, domestic, and international contexts have changed. The third section details the data and method employed in the empirical analysis of the inflation-adjusted difference between fiscal year presidential budget requests and congressional appropriations from 1959-2009 using an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model. The fourth and fifth sections of the analysis, respectively, provide a comprehensive interpretation of the findings and a recapitulation of the import of this research for an understanding of executive-legislative relations on non-traditional policy areas.

THE POLITICS OF UNEARTHLY BUDGETING: NASA AS AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE?

Compared to other policy areas, NASA’s budget has been vulnerable to dramatic shifts, a frequent lack of (or only feigned) presidential interest, and the focus of incessant congressional cutbacks since the Apollo program. The explanations for this dynamic, discussed below, are multiple and intertwining and provide a critical backdrop to the analysis of congressional appropriations politics that follows.

The Political Environment: From Apollo to “Star Wars”

NASA’s success in procuring funding has been largely contingent upon how presidents and Congress have framed its role and usefulness. The agency’s programs—whether the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, or missions to Mars, Jupiter or the International Space Station—do not fall neatly within any particular policy area. Rather, NASA’s programs straddle domestic, defense and foreign policies.

In the early Cold War era the political environment was highly favorable to space exploration. After the Soviets Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 there was a sense of urgency, both in terms of national security and prestige, to advancing space policy (Kay 1998). Sputnik was militarily significant insofar as its launch elucidated that the Soviets had ballistic missile capability, with disturbing implications for the delivery of nuclear warheads. For his part, President Eisenhower supported satellite technology to compete with the Soviets, but was not enthralled with the idea of putting a man on the moon, per se. President Kennedy, on the other hand, used his support for space policy as a central issue in the 1960 campaign against incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon and to bolster his claims of a “missile gap” between the US and the Soviets. Indeed, it was under Kennedy’s presidency that NASA’s budget skyrocketed, only to commence a precipitous decline and relatively flat rate of inflation-adjusted appropriations beginning in 1964. As Figure 1 shows, Congressional appropriations during the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies hewed closely to presidential requests, and even exceeded them. The data also do accentuate that presidential budget requests for NASA form the critical context within which Congress considers the agency’s funding. The simple correlation between presidential requests and actual appropriations is r = .97. Yet since 1964 congressional appropriations have routinely fallen below presidential requests by a billion or more (inflation-adjusted).

[Figure 1]

In the post-Apollo era the urgency of space flight waned in light of the protracted conflict in Vietnam, the rising costs of domestic entitlement programs, and exorbitant federal deficits that reduced the discretionary portion of the federal budget significantly by the 1970s and 1980s. These factors contributed to a palpable decline in support of NASA in both the executive and legislative branches (Byrnes 1994, 115-16). President Nixon approved the space shuttle reluctantly, President Ford was preoccupied with “stagflation” (high unemployment and high inflation), and President Carter emphasized space policy only insofar as cost savings were involved. President Reagan utilized lofty rhetoric in terms of space exploration, going so far as to endorse U.S. plans for a space station in 1984. But in reality Reagan was focused far more on the Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” than NASA programs (Krug 2004, 67; 92).

Key personalities in Congress seized on domestic concerns during this period in the bid to redirect funding from space exploration to other policy realms. Even before Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, prominent liberals in Congress resented spending on the Apollo program specifically, and science and technology more generally. In the House, representatives including Ed Koch (D-NY) and James Fulton (R-PA) were particularly skeptical of NASA (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1969, 300-05). Two of NASA’s most implacable foes in the Senate through the 1960s and 1970s included Walter Mondale (D-MN), later Vice President to Jimmy Carter (1977-80), and maverick William Proxmire (D-WI).

Mondale, Proximire, and others were only variably successful in their bid to shift funding for NASA to other programs in an earlier era during which budget politics were less complex in Congress, and the Cold War still loomed large. NASA profited from powerful allies on Capitol Hill to thwart its opponents. James C. Fletcher, the NASA administrator from 1971-77, noted that “In the Senate especially, but to some degree in the House, there are individuals who seem to sway the rest of the body” (Fletcher 1994, 240). He cited Senators Stennis (D-MS), Goldwater (R-AZ), and Cranston (D-CA) as steadfast supporters of NASA, and attributed these legislators’ leadership as a major factor in staving off the efforts of Proxmire and others to de-fund agency priorities such as the development of the space shuttle.

Budget Reform, Constituency “Matters,” and the NASA Bureaucracy

In the heyday of the “textbook” or “pre-reform” Congress (1959-73) iconic figures on Capitol Hill held considerable influence over NASA’s budget. The passage of the Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 changed that dynamic considerably. The Budget Act portended not only serious consequences for presidential-congressional relations on budget policymaking generally, but for NASA specifically. The effects of budget reform have been well-documented in the literature and need not be recounted in detail here (Copeland 1984; Shumavon 1981; Thurber 1997). The import for NASA, like other agencies, is that Congress sought to centralize the means by which congressional committees treated the president’s annual budget submission. As Walter Oleszek (1983, 198) argues, “The centralization occurred, however, not by merging any of the authorizing, appropriating, or taxing committees” but by fragmenting the process across thirteen committees responsible for executive departments and independent agencies. Adding to the complexity was an expansion of subcommittees that further disjointed the appropriations process.

The Budget Act, combined with legislative efforts to control the subsequent deficits the Act helped engender, such as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings in the 1980s, forced congressional attention on spending cuts and budgetary control without a wholesale altering of presidential priorities (Thurber 1988, 105), of which space remained largely ancillary. The use of procedures such as “reconciliation,” employed first by Reagan in 1981, only added to the complexity of the process, or as Joyce (1996, 321) argues, “layered a new process on top of the existing authorization and appropriations processes.”

The 1974 Budget Act consolidated NASA’s funding with that of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Veterans Affairs (VA), and more than a dozen independent agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). All of these agencies’ budgets are typically folded into a single bill. The result is that NASA’s budget has been subject to acute annual competition for funds and congressional “horse trading” across programmatic areas, often to the agency’s detriment in an era of scarce resources (see Telscon 1992). No longer are key congressional figures as able to influence the budget process as they once were in the “textbook era.”

In assessing annual budgeting for VA-HUD-NASA-Independent Agencies since budget reform, as Johnson-Freese (2004, 82) explains, “it is useful to think in terms of numbers of voters in each category directly benefiting from federal expenditures.” NASA’s budget has been far more susceptible to the whims of Congress compared to traditional policy areas (Handberg, Johnson-Freese, and Moore 1995; Handberg 1998; Murray 1987). The reason is straightforward: The agency lacks a core constituency. NASA’s economic constituency essentially comprises those scientists or private sector contractors with interests in aeronautics and technology. The agency’s geographic constituency consists of only a few states—Alabama (Marshall Space Flight Center), California (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Florida (Kennedy Space Center), and Texas (Johnson Space Center)—which are most affected by the agency’s budget. Members from constituencies with NASA employees certainly have strong electoral incentives to protect funding for the agency’s human spaceflight programs (Broniatowski and Weigel 2008, 150). Yet such members are routinely outnumbered relative to appropriators whose core constituents include veterans, construction firms desiring federal subsidies for public works for housing projects, or environmental lobbying groups.

Although public support for NASA has generally been strong (Launius 2003), the segment of the population “attentive” to space exploration issues is ten percent or less (Miller 1987). Public opinion therefore does not provide a genuine “constituency” of significant influence over members of the powerful authorizing and appropriating committees in Congress. Moreover, NASA’s spaceflight programs typically generate intangible rather than broad, direct benefits that affect specific social or geographic constituencies. As Roberts (1990, 140) contends NASA’s arguments about “spinoff” technological advances have “not persuaded many voters, and the perceived benefits of space are limited to a narrow community which does not garner much public, hence political, support.”

It is understandable, then, why NASA’s long-term programmatic goals have often fallen victim to more pressing social or economic concerns. Members of authorizing committees, and of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, assess the relative cost-benefit ratio of space exploration funding vis-à-vis their quest for reelection—a paramount concern (Mayhew 1974). In the annual appropriations process, members naturally attempt to “earmark” projects to the states or districts they represent to maximize the benefits to those who elected them (Schick 2007, 244). Cuts to NASA’s budget, particularly in an era of scarce resources and high federal debt, entail few constituency ramifications for most members on Capitol Hill. “Civilian space projects,” Vedda (2002, 287) accentuates, “have never been significant campaign issues, and there has been little in the way of organized efforts by political parties to take sides in this area.”

NASA’s budget is consequently at a disadvantage when it reaches the final stage of the appropriations process, amalgamated as it is with VA, HUD, and other independent agencies. While many members may find space exploration and human spaceflight appealing, the imperatives of their own reelection incentive and constituency concerns may operate against NASA’s long-term programmatic interests:

…supporters of programs in a given subcommittee—who had been allies up to this stage—now compete against each other within that subcommittee. Thus, the ‘currency’ in which votes trade is far from transparent. A shuttle flight is the equivalent of how many jobs, houses, and veterans’ benefits; how much national prestige; how many new recruits into the study of science and engineering…” (Macauley 1992, 55)

Simply put, compared to other policy areas such as housing, health, or law enforcement that require urgent attention in the social realm—particularly in election years—space policy appears far more “discretionary” for most members of Congress (Lambright 1992, 192).

Large-scale programs like NASA’s are always vulnerable to congressional reevaluations (Ginzberg et al. 1976, 18-19). But as Kay (1998) posits, “most government programs succeed or fail only in a relative sense.” This has not been the case for NASA. Cost overruns for long-term programs have not only tarnished NASA’s image in Congress since the Apollo era (McCurdy 1994, 281), but the loss of the Mars orbiter and the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) are dramatic examples of the agency’s putative shortcomings that have received much media attention. Such disasters have exacerbated congressional criticism of the space program in recent decades. NASA has become a frequent target of congressional reproof for alleged over-bureaucratization. Whatever the number of successful ventures the agency has undertaken, recriminations of NASA’s organizational culture—one purportedly defined by needless administrative complexity and bureaucratic inflexibility—have undermined congressional confidence, adding to NASA’s woes in the battle of the budget (Augustine Committee 1990; Lambright 1992; McCurdy 1991; 1992). Further, NASA must routinely compete with the Department of Defense over space funding in the annual appropriations process (Kloman 1988), as some legislators believe the military is better able to develop and implement space technologies.