Proposed NASA Cuts Threaten 40,000 Jobs

In another sharp blow to the aerospace industry, NASA and its contractors stand to lose at least 40,000 jobs nationwide, including up to 3,000 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, under severe new budget cuts approved by the House on Thursday.

The Republican-led funding cuts would roughly double the size of reductions planned by NASA over the past half-year. The space agency is scheduled to disclose a plan of its own today that will eliminate roughly 20,000 jobs.

The size of the additional cuts caught NASA officials by surprise when they were revealed by the House Budget Committee a week ago. The first assessment of the potential impact on space agency programs, which employ roughly 100,000 people nationwide, came in an internal NASA memo obtained by The Times.

The budget resolution passed by the House provides a rough framework for the cuts over a five-year period, but the detailed NASA budgets must work their way through a number of House and Senate committees.

In an interview Thursday, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin expressed serious misgivings and irritation over the proposed congressional cutbacks, saying NASA has stepped up to the task of cutting fat without killing a single important scientific program or mission.

Goldin declined to say how many jobs he would cut in California under his plan, though he acknowledged that none of the three NASA centers in the state would be spared. Other NASA officials estimated that about 2,000 jobs in the state would be at stake.

The deeper congressional cuts, if enacted, will force cancellation of important NASA missions and send a message that “nobody is willing to invest a plug nickel” for research that would benefit future generations, Goldin said.

“I want to tell you I have had it,” an angry Goldin said. “That [additional congressional] cut is 20,000 jobs. Well, maybe they ought to cancel the space program. Then we could all sit in the bleachers and watch the rest of the world go by. Japan’s space budget is increasing.”

The NASA memo, prepared by staff analysts for senior agency officials, projects that the GOP cutbacks would result in the loss of 300 jobs at Dryden Flight Research Center near Lancaster and 3,900 jobs at Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale--resulting in the virtual closure of that facility.

JPL spokesman George Alexander said NASA told the officials of the laboratory, operated under contract by Caltech, to anticipate a loss of about 20% or 1,100 jobs over a five-year period. But the GOP plan would halve JPL’s current work force of 5,600, according to the memo. Alexander called that a Draconian cut and suggested that the memo is premature.

At current staffing levels, NASA is now smaller than it was in 1962. The NASA memo projects that the job losses from the GOP cuts will total 55,000, but Goldin was more conservative, saying the losses would range closer to 40,000.

Republican leaders have charged in recent weeks that protests about budget cuts show that the Democrats don’t understand the momentum to balance the federal budget. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has called the protests a “primal scream” that lacks intellectual content.

“They don’t get it,” said a House Science Committee staffer. “We are going to cut the budget. We can’t keep spending money the way we have been.”

A report issued by the House Budget Committee, outlining the rationale for its cuts, asserts that many of NASA’s efforts should be funded by private industry. The report, for example, calls on the agency to privatize the space shuttle operation at a projected savings of $1.5 billion.

The Senate is also likely to cut the NASA budget, but a Senate Budget Committee resolution was less severe than the House in its overall cuts. Any future reconciling of differences will likely end up making big cuts, analysts said.

The House cuts do not specifically target the space shuttle or NASA’s proposed space station, the two biggest programs in the agency--meaning that many lower-profile scientific and space exploration programs would be seriously cut. The internal memo cites the possibility of closing an entire NASA center or eliminating the “mission to planet Earth” program, an ambitious environmental research effort.

Nonetheless, the cuts are so great that Goldin suggested they would also jeopardize the space station.

“What everybody wants is road kill,” Goldin said. “And the latest road kill is the space station. They say: ‘Dan, we want to see you cut a NASA center.’ That is a bunch of crap.

“If this happens, there [are] going to be major, major cuts in programs and capability,” he added. “We are going to have to eliminate an enterprise from NASA. We are not going to be able to satisfy the Space Act of 1958, and we are not going to satisfy future generations.”

Throughout Washington, Democrats have bristled at the Republican cutbacks to science budgets. Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), former chairman of the House Science Committee, said the new NASA budget cuts amount to “unilateral disarmament in the war to maintain the American standard of living.”

Goldin said he is not trying to defend the NASA budget as a jobs program. He noted, however, that the Republican cuts would seriously jeopardize a new sense of innovation and efficiency at the agency.

Goldin lauded efforts at JPL, saying the agency has emerged as a leader in the new imperative to cut costs. He pulled out a model of a new JPL planetary probe, which in actual size resembles a shoe box. JPL has created spacecraft designs that cut costs by a factor of 10 in some cases, Goldin said.

Goldin cited the recent decision of Silicon Graphics Inc. to create 3,000 new jobs at a facility adjacent to the Ames Research Center as an example of the powerful influence that NASA has on emerging technologies. Ames is a leader in computer simulation of aerodynamic forces, a discipline that has broad applications to other types of computer modeling.

Among the specific targets contained in the Republican cuts would be NASA’s role in conducting basic aeronautics research, which has returned major economic dividends ever since the 1930s, according to White House science adviser John Gibbons.

Gibbons said cuts to NASA’s aeronautics budget would seriously hurt Boeing Co. and McDonnell Douglas Corp. in their intense competition against European plane maker Airbus Industrie, which has gained significant market share at the expense of U.S. firms over the last decade.

The cutbacks approved by the House would impose a $5.8-billion cut on NASA over the next five years, in addition to a $5-billion cut contained in the Clinton Administration’s 1996 budget.

NASA’s budget this year is $14.4 billion. Budget cuts proposed by the Administration would reduce it to $13.1 billion a year in five years, not accounting for the effects of future inflation. The additional GOP cuts would drop the budget to $11.5 billion. Inflation would cut the purchasing power of that budget by more than another $1 billion, NASA officials said.