No moon in our future

Gail Collins has an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times about NASA's problems:

How can you not be fascinated when the White House announces it wants to cancel plans to put an American on the moon by 2020? Weren’t we already there? I have a distinct memory of watching a guy who looked a little like the Pillsbury Doughboy, planting an American flag in moon dirt back in 1969. The television image was black and white. Walter Cronkite was so excited.
And didn’t George W. Bush promise to get us to Mars? Well, the first step to Mars is apparently moon-visitation. NASA now admits the best-case scenario for that is actually 2030. After that, of course, things would move much faster, until a midflight technical malfunction puts Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon in mortal danger. But things will end happily. Before you know it, the Dow hits 1,000, Richard Nixon resigns, and Mars, here we come.
The White House wants to save $3.4 billion a year with a game-changing/paradigm-shifting space program that does not require any moon landings. The new goal is a little hazy. But it involves, as a spokeswoman for the space agency put it, “going farther, faster, to interesting destinations as we learn things”. Beyond that, all I can tell you for sure is that it will be bold. But bold in a less-expensive way.
In Washington, this is always a time of innocent hope, when earnest budgeteers look for unnecessary programs to axe so they can prove to the country that government is efficient. This year, the Department of Education wins the fiscal tidiness award, having proposed to eliminate seven programs, consolidate 38 others and wipe out $123 million in earmarks. Good work, Department of Education! And good luck actually getting rid of them.
Cutting a federal program is next to impossible because there’s usually somebody who cares much more about keeping it than the White House does about making it go away. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is already making whimpering noises about the NASA budget cuts, which will, if necessary, eventually rise to guttural howls.
Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York had issued a scathing press release attacking plans to eliminate $5 million in grants to manufacturers of worsted wool. “I will fight to make sure this proposal never sees the light of day,” said Schumer, who claimed that dropping the grants could ruin “Rochester’s iconic Hickey Freeman”, a men’s clothing company. It turned out that Hickey Freeman gets a different wool-manufacturer break entirely. Rochester is saved!
My own favorite target for extinction is a $9 million annual appropriation for museums and educational programs that highlight the “shared culture and tradition” of Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and “children and families of Massachusetts”. In other words, whaling. This was originally the idea of Ted Kennedy and two colleagues from Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps they had all just finished rereading Moby-Dick in a Senate book club. Or maybe somebody bet them they couldn’t think of an earmark that would apply to only their three states.
In 2006, Congress did vote to add a fourth beneficiary of the whaling museum money— the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi. No one seems to know why, but we’re pretty sure it has more to do with the state’s earmark-loving senior senator, Thad Cochran, than Mississippi’s rich whaling tradition. Cochran happens to be vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and I’m betting he also has the answer to why the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation, which was established to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, is still in business eighteen years after the fact. I am only saying this because the vice chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees is the former leader of the Mississippi Republican Party. The chairwoman is a Republican realtor from Arizona. “I feel so terrible,” one budget maven told me. “I always secretly imagined it had something to do with Nancy Pelosi.” The Columbus foundation gives out prizes to people who, um, discover things and runs a contest for middle school students who have ideas about community improvement. The winners go to Disney World and then to the Christopher Columbus Academy, which also happens to be in Disney World.
Is that worth a million dollars a year in federal money? I’m more jealous than angry. I’ve always wanted to get something really neat and wasteful from Washington, like a pigeon museum. But, no, all we get are grants to look for explosives in the harbor. It does seem as if the people who spend all their time carping about the deficit should step up to the plate, though. We are looking at you, Scott Brown. Give back that whale money.