The Washington Post July 10, 2003
Panelist Faults NASA Cutbacks; Shuttle Report Will Note Funds Shifted From Safety Efforts
By Eric Pianin
Budget cuts in the space shuttle program throughout the 1990s forced postponement of important upgrades, prompted reductions in safety personnel, and led to a serious deterioration of crucial NASA facilities and infrastructure, according to the member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board who is drafting that portion of its final report.
While the board has found no evidence that belt-tightening during the space agency's turbulent past decade led directly to the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster, some board members have concluded that NASA officials cut corners on safety and maintenance programs in response to pressures from policymakers in the agency, at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
"It's hard to draw a direct link between budget cuts and specific actions, but they certainly provide the context within which the program operated, and it was a severely constrained context," said John M. Logsdon, a George Washington University space policy expert and the board member who is drafting a chapter on the impact of budget cuts. Board officials said yesterday that publication of the report has been delayed a month, to late August.
"The infrastructure was crumbling, upgrades were delayed and personnel cuts had been pretty severe," he added.
Recent public testimony before the board and findings outlined by Logsdon in interviews this week indicate that the final report will devote considerable attention to the long-term effects of budget constraints on shuttle safety throughout the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and President Bush.
The document is almost certain to echo the criticisms of many outside experts, past independent commissions and lawmakers that NASA repeatedly shortchanged safety upgrades and technical enhancements by linking the fate of the aging space shuttles to the much larger, more expensive and troubled joint space station venture with the Russians.
"Clearly, one decision the board will reach is that too many decisions were prompted by budgetary concerns," said a senior House aide who was privy to a closed meeting Tuesday between key members of Congress and the board.
The panel, headed by retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., is basing its assessments heavily on private interviews with present and former NASA officials as well as on congressional budget and appropriations documents and analyses by the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress.
The investigators believe they have pieced together the broad outlines of budget policymaking that shaped NASA over the past decade, but there will be some gaps because of a tactical decision not to press for internal documents of the current and former administrations, including from the Office of Management and Budget.
Although Marcia S. Smith, an aerospace specialist with the Congressional Research Service, recently told the board that it was crucial to gain access to White House and OMB documents to understand "the whole budget ballet that goes on," the board was advised by NASA's general counsel that those internal documents and deliberations are protected by executive privilege and that it would be pointless with the board's limited time to try to obtain them.
In April, the board, in a compromise with the Bush administration, gained access to summaries -- but not to working documents -- of the internal budget deliberations, a board source said.
OMB spokesman Trent Duffy said yesterday, "This administration has operated under the policy of every other administration, which is that deliberative material is not disclosed."
Efforts by the General Accounting Office and activist groups to obtain records of secret meetings of Vice President Cheney's energy task force resulted in protracted legal battles -- something the Columbia board was determined to avoid.
NASA's $ 15 billion annual budget has been relatively flat for more than a decade, and the shuttle program's funding was raided repeatedly, Logsdon said.
"When you start adding up the overall NASA budget picture and the shuttle budget picture over the past decade, it's rather clear the shuttle had disproportionately taken budget cuts to fund the space station, to fund Russian participation in the station," Logsdon said. "The shuttle program has served as sort of a cash cow."
Between 1993 and 2000, the space shuttle's operating budget was slashed by more than $ 1 billion a year as a result of policy decisions by NASA, the White House and Congress to cancel two major shuttle upgrades and to shift money to help finance the construction of the space station and to reduce a government-wide budget deficit.
NASA shifted more than $ 330 million from the space shuttle program to the space station project during that period, according to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service. More than $ 600 million was cut as part of government-wide belt tightening and deficit reduction. NASA saved an additional $ 300 million by canceling programs to develop a replacement for the shuttles' trouble-plagued auxiliary power units -- which power the hydraulic steering system -- and an Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, a new detachable booster.
Under then-NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, the agency shifted much of the responsibility for running the shuttle program to outside contractors and ordered deep cuts in government personnel, including the elimination of more than half the maintenance personnel and safety officers, according to published reports and some experts. As a result, the board was told, the shuttle program began to show signs of deterioration. Facilities and equipment at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the space shuttles are assembled and launched, were increasingly in need of replacement.
Gen. Roy Bridges, former director of the space center, testified in March that the center's construction budget was grossly underfunded during the mid- to late 1990s and that there wasn't enough to pay for needed work on the huge Vehicle Assembly Building and a backlog of maintenance and repair. He complained that maintenance technicians were working in dilapidated, 20-year-old trailers.
"I was appalled and believed that it was a safety issue," Bridges said.
The issue of budget pressures has also arisen with the revelation that NASA never conducted physical tests of the effects of a debris strike against the leading edge of the orbiter's wings. Earlier this week, tests by a San Antonio laboratory produced compelling evidence that Columbia was fatally damaged by a large chunk of foam that struck the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing 81 seconds after liftoff.
In the tests, a foam bullet fired at 500 mph blew a huge hole in a section of a space shuttle's wing, creating a breach that would have allowed superheated gases to penetrate and destroy the shuttle wing during reentry.
John Pike, a space expert who runs GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit space and defense policy group, said yesterday that the board's finding highlighted a major problem, that for years NASA has been testing key shuttle components "on the cheap" with computer models and simulations but often without the physical tests of hardware that would provide the clearest picture of potential flaws.
Gehman, the board's chairman, and other members are intensely interested in documenting the budgetary tradeoffs that frequently confronted NASA decision-makers while determining how to best allocate limited resources, a board source said.
"They're interested in questions like, what if you need more for maintenance? Does [the agency] take it out of testing?" the source said.
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2003, The Washington Post
