WASHINGTON – House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) issued the following statement today in response to the National Academy of Sciences’ report “An Assessment of Balance in NASA’s Science Programs,” which was released yesterday:
“The Academy report bears out what I have been saying since the Administration budget was released in February and what witnesses argued at the Science Committee’s March 2 hearing on NASA’s science programs: NASA’s proposed fiscal 2007 budget provides inadequate funding for earth and space science and in particular gives short shrift to the smaller projects that are necessary to keep science progressing and to train new scientists. I think the Academy report gets it exactly right when it concludes that ‘the program proposed for space and Earth sciences is not robust; it is not properly balanced to support a healthy mix of small, moderate-size and large missions and an underlying foundation of scientific research and advanced technology projects; and it is neither sustainable nor capable of making adequate progress toward the goals that were recommended in the National Research Council’s decadal surveys.’
“I will continue to work with the Appropriations Committee to correct these failings, which will obviously be difficult in such a tight budget year. But we should not be satisfied with a fiscal 2007 budget that provides less for science than was provided in fiscal 2005. NASA needs to remain a multi-mission agency.”
