White House Fought to Save Space Station

The House’s vote to save the multibillion-dollar manned space station capped a frenetic lobbying spree by Bush Administration officials, for whom the massive space project is that rare thing--a domestic spending program they care about.

For Administration officials, the fight over the space station was an object lesson in the painful new realities of federal budgeting.

“This country’s got serious fiscal problems, serious,” said Rep. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.), chairman of the House panel that voted last month to kill the space station. “You can’t do everything any more.”

Normally, over the last two years, it has been Bush and his aides who have been making that argument. But, for the President and his advisers, funding the space station involves both political self-interest and basic ideology.

The aerospace industry has been a chief engine of growth for the Southwest and West, areas that have been politically important to Republicans in general and to Bush in particular. The President’s adopted hometown, Houston, is also the home of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In the fight over the space station, that sort of geographical factor turned several leading Democrats, normally at odds with Bush over spending priorities, into allies.

The measure to restore money for the station was offered by a California Republican, Rep. Bill Lowery of San Diego, and a Texas Democrat, Rep. Jim Chapman; and those two state delegations together provided 56 votes for the station, more than one-fourth of the total needed to put the program back in the budget.

Democratic Rep. Norman Y. Mineta, whose San Jose district relies heavily on high-technology employment, became a chief vote counter for Bush’s allies, as did the House majority leader, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), whose hometown of St. Louis is headquarters for McDonnell Douglas Corp., a leading space station contractor.

But, beyond the geographical arguments, the space station--in marked contrast with typical social spending programs--is a hot item for Bush and his aides.

“This is investment in the future,” one White House aide said. Social spending, Bush and his aides believe, only soothes problems, it does not solve them. Spending for technology, by contrast, “improves the quality of life in the long term,” the aide argued. “If we don’t look to the future, in 20, 30 years this country is dead.”

Those arguments were enough to call out one of the heaviest Administration lobbying barrages of the year. Wednesday night, Bush buttonholed dozens of members of Congress at a White House barbecue. Vice President Dan Quayle, traveling in Eastern Europe, was called on to telephone key congressmen from Bonn, Warsaw and Prague.

As the vote neared Thursday, NASA and the Office of Management and Budget mobilized a dozen staff members to set up a war room on Capitol Hill, passing urgent messages from vote counters to lobbyists. And, back in his White House office, Budget Director Richard G. Darman, normally the Administration’s chief slasher of big budget projects, delivered a personal hard sell to line up last-minute votes.

And the White House, which over the last few years has lined up the Japanese and Europeans as partners in the space station project, called on foreign officials to press the case.

On the other side, Appropriations Committee members leaned heavily on their colleagues, warning that those who voted against the committee’s decision to cut the space station could jeopardize their own pet projects.