Terrific. NASA will continue to lose connection with the rest of the technological world, reduce their involvement in opportunities to win over talented and intelligent people and fail to sell their story to the people who could be most sympathetic and understanding of their goals and their challenges. Not too smart, if you ask me.

So the "rsearch" centers won't be able to present their results at conferences but HQ personnel wil still be able to attend air shows and take personal assistants on overseas travel.

Truly ridiculous that congress would legislate conference attendance? This is the pot calling the kettle black.

You have the Senators from Okla-fing-homa to thank for this.

Tens of millions for faith-based crap, five million for seeding science.

This seems like the people that wrote the Authorization act were reacting to something that they saw as wasteful and it would be nice to know what that was. If the point was saving money there were a lot of other places where they could cut and I'm sure they could make bigger cuts, since the amount of money saved by the travel restriction really isn't very significant in a budget the size of NASA's.
Also, if you read the rest of the notice they say that "the legislation significantly restricts expenditures for the Space Flight Awareness Awards Program."
So they chopped funding for conference travel and Space Flight Awareness Awards. It seem to me that there was something the agency did involving those two areas that they didn't like, and I would sure like to know what it was.

NASA MUST get outside its own walls to build networks of expert colleagues, obtain and share reliable information and knowledge and build the credibility and visibility of the research and development it does. This is absolutely necessary. NASA is increasingly involved with professional organizations--in the US and abroad and with other Space agencies. This outreach and innovation driving is what I do at KSC. It has taken extraordinary effort and management support to work on important international standards for space, safety and performance-- These rely on selective international and domestic conferences--planning, writing, presenting, serving on committees,encouraging support from busy engineers and scientists. These enable us to share and elicit ideas for the breakthroughs we need for Space exploration. I came back last night from a conference in Noordwyck, the Netherlands where, representing NASa, I was the keynote speaker on this subject at an international conference on simulation. Today, I am working on a list of follow-on activities, potential connections for colleagues here in NASA and partnering opportunities including some immediate projects. Space is without borders and those who work to advance what we know and can do in Space must be too. My division chief set me news of this, as he said, "brilliant" decision. Quite a homecoming. I join those who would like to understand the evidence behind this bizarre decision and hope that wiser heads prevail..

The public needs to know what we do within NASA and with our colleagues in university and industry. We have suffered for years with limitations of one domestic trip to a professional meeting and only within the past few years have been allowed through full cost accounting (the one and only positive about full cost accounting) to trade salary and equipment resources for travel when necessary. We accomplish much through email and journal papers, but much more happens much more quickly when we can work for just a few days in person, discussing our concepts of how things work and tests to improve our understanding of planets, stars, galaxies and the universe.

Perhaps the Senate should limit itself to $5 million travel. Indeed if both the House and Senate did such, they might stay longer in Washington and accomplish more appropriate legislation!
In this time of greatly decreased resources within NASA to guide and coordinate science, this is just one more blow to an agency within the government that once could accomplish amazing research.