Amendment Offered by Mr. Flake

AMENDMENT OFFERED BY MR. FLAKE

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Mr. MOLLOHAN. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. Just the fact that the gentleman from Massachusetts has spent so much time explaining what his amendment means I think is the best proof that it is so vague that we don't really know what we are not funding with this amendment.

There is $3.9 billion in the Constellation Systems account. Conceivably, the amendment could prevent any of that spending. All of it, it could be argued, relates to a manned space mission to Mars.

The amendment is so vague that I think that is why everybody is really concerned about it.

It is absolutely true that NASA is having problems. There is no question about it. The President has proposed a space exploration initiative. He calls it a vision, in some ways of course it would be if, if, it were genuinely funded. My concern is that it is not genuinely funded.

There are a lot of problems with NASA funding, but it all has to do with not enough funding to do everything that we want to do. That is evidenced by the myriad of science programs that are either cancelled or cut in the President's budget. It is terrible.

Every scientist that is at all concerned about operating in the NASA camp has expressed how opposed they are to the NASA funding. But this, to me, is not the way to get at that.

What we do need is more money in NASA, and NASA, I think, frankly needs to come forward with a budget that is more specific, one that we can deal with, instead of coming up with these operating plans. That really is a very imperfect way to fund an agency.

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