when Cunningham was forced out over ethics violations and lobbying influence peddling
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/09/delay-duke-appropriations/http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2005/050509-delay-nasa.htmmore on Delay and NASA
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The scandal-scented Republican House majority leader has invaded NASA, grabbing its biggest outpost and taking a rather personal interest in the agency's budget. He has established himself as the go-to guy on Capitol Hill regarding NASA. And given the way Washington works, this means he can influence how the agency carves up its $16 billion pie and how it resolves critical policy debates--matters of keen interest to aerospace and military contractors, who often look to make contributions to friendly or feared legislators. Fans of NASA might cheer DeLay's involvement. "It's always to the benefit of the agency to have someone in the leadership interested in the agency's budget," says Wesley Huntress Jr., an associate administrator of NASA in the 1990s. "And Tom DeLay is very interested in NASA." But anyone concerned about good government and effective and appropriate budgeting decisions ought to fret about The Hammer's sway over NASA. "With NASA changing its spending priorities to support President Bush's vision for space exploration that will return humans to the moon and take them to Mars, there will be plenty of money going to start-up companies with no record of producing hardware, and there will be no way to measure results," says John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org. "DeLay, if he wants, will be in charge of a free-for-all, with money flowing everywhere--mainly flying in the direction he directs." NASA, then, is another potential source of money and power for DeLay--if he survives his ethics troubles.
For years, DeLay has expressed an interest in the space program. But last year he hit the boost phase. First, without making much noise about it, he seized the Johnson Space Center. Located outside Houston, the JSC hosts the mission control center that manages space shuttle missions and space station activity, and it oversees development and production of spacecraft for human space exploration. One of the largest employers in Texas, the center boasts about 15,000 workers. Until last year the JSC was miles outside DeLay's Congressional district. When he and other Texas Republicans orchestrated a controversial redrawing of district lines in 2003, they wiped out the district next to DeLay's, a Democratic stronghold that included the JSC. At the same time, an elbow-shaped piece of territory was added to the east side of DeLay's district. This patch stretched far enough to wrap around the Johnson Space Center.
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It wasn't until DeLay, who won re-election in November with an unimpressive 55 percent, was sworn in as a House member in January that he officially became the legislator representing the JSC.
But before that, he was already acting as NASA's guardian--or avenging--angel. At the start of 2004, Bush proposed spending $16.2 billion on NASA in the 2005 budget, granting NASA the only proposed spending hike for a domestic agency not involved in defense or homeland security. The funding increase was linked to Bush's new moon-Mars initiative. But not every Republican was enthralled with Bush's proposal. The GOP-run House appropriations subcommittee on veterans and housing--which oversaw NASA's funding--trimmed NASA's budget by $1.1 billion, partly to make room for funding for veterans' healthcare. Bush then threatened to veto the $92 billion appropriations bill that included NASA's money. More important, DeLay hit the warpath.
"To me, that's unacceptable," DeLay said of the decrease in NASA funding. "And it would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it's unacceptable to me." DeLay was right. He kept the subcommittee's bill bottled up. (During this spending battle, aerospace firms like Northrop Grumman and Boeing funded a reception honoring DeLay at the GOP convention.) The appropriations bill covering NASA eventually was incorporated into an omnibus spending measure. And in December DeLay threatened to block that legislation unless NASA received the full funding proposed by Bush. According to Democrats on the appropriations committee, to accommodate DeLay the committee had to apply a nearly 1 percent cut to other programs. This meant slashing $456 million in education, $225 million in veterans' healthcare and $61 million in scientific research. DeLay didn't mind. He held firm and got his way. This approach to budgeting was unprecedented. "Usually the House and the Senate come up with their own numbers for NASA and then compromise at a level in between," says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. "In this case, DeLay intervened, and the final number came out higher than the House or Senate level." DeLay later boasted during a visit to the JSC, "I wouldn't schedule the bill until NASA was taken care of." He probably put the NASA guy in place - the one who was just forced to step down..
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