What's worse is that the Administration does not have the courtesy or the courage to be up front and honest with the American people about the cost of this bailout. It won't put the $660 million bailout in writing.

Instead, all the White House will let NASA talk about is the tip of the iceberg, $60 million that it wants to pay the Russians immediately. Why is that? I think it's because the White House does not want to admit that its management of our relationship with Russia is fundamentally flawed. The President promised me in writing in 1994 that we would not be dependent on the Russians to build the International Space Station. The Administration's representatives from the White House, the State Department, and NASA all came up here and repeated that falsehood for years. And now the Administration wants to stick the American taxpayer with the costs of its mistakes?just to hide the fact that it made them. It is not a mere coincidence that the Administration waited until the last and busiest week of this Congress to propose this bailout.

The Administration aggressively lobbied Congress to support bringing Russia into the program. For a while you couldn't walk down the halls without tripping over someone from the White House or the State Department trying to convince you of all of the benefits for starting this partnership. But suddenly, when NASA has to pay the bill for someone else's foreign policy and budgetary failures, the White House and the State Department are nowhere to be seen. They refused to testify at this hearing, although their decisions have brought us to this point.

Worse still, the Administration is now lobbying the Senate to oppose the NASA Authorization bill in order to escape accountability. A year and a half ago this Committee adopted and the House of Representatives passed a two-year authorization bill with an amendment that Mr. Brown and I wrote. We directed the Administration to create the contingency plan that it promised it already had and tried to establish a decision tree that would have helped prevent our current problems. The amendment also precluded NASA from paying the Russians to do work they had already committed to perform as partners. Now, when the Senate is considering similar measures along with cost caps and timelines, NASA has pulled out all the stops to prevent passage. In doing so, NASA is attempting to thwart the desire of the American people to have accountability and sound management in government. That's treading on dangerously thin ice where I come from.

I cannot go along with NASA's request to start bailing out the Russian space program. I've seen nothing since passage of the Sensenbrenner-Brown amendment that would lead me to believe that NASA, the White House, or the Russians would make good use of the money. An appearance at today's hearing by the White House and State Department would have at least sent a signal that they cared about the program and wanted to work with us towards a solution. That is why the Speaker and I sent letters to Mr. Talbott and Mr. Lew asking them to reconsider their refusals to appear. We also stated that we could not begin to consider supporting this initial $60 million reallocation without their constructive participation in the process.

The plain truth is that the White House is addicted to the Russians. I'm beginning to think it doesn't care whether the Space Station gets built, so long as the Russians are happy. The problem is that our relationship with the Russian space program is fundamentally flawed and is hurting our national interest. What makes me particularly angry is that all of the talent, the creativity, the energy, and the passion that exist for space within NASA is being wasted in frantic efforts to create ad-hoc, short-term bandaids that enable the White House to indulge its addiction to Russia instead of being channeled into actually building our Space Station and opening the space frontier. We need to kick this habit. Congress has repeatedly offered a range of suggestions, each of which the White House has summarily rejected.

The Administration is backing us into a corner and setting up a confrontation that could undermine all of the good things our space program has accomplished. I see only one way of avoiding it. The Administration needs to take the Russian government out of the critical path-now. Congress expected that four years ago and the Administration promised we wouldn't become dependent on Russia. It lied. Last April, the Cost Assessment and Validation Task Force recommended the immediate initiation of a U.S. propulsion capability.

On July 30th, NASA recommended that to the White House. Both times, the White House said no. It prefers the long-term, hidden costs of its dependence on Russia to the short term pain of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.

Well, I do not. If we don't see some willingness to meet Congress in the middle and some acceptance of reality from the White House soon, then I plan to spend time working with the other members of this Committee and drafting legislation for the next Congress that will put an end to this problem, one way or the other. My colleagues and I may find a way to do that and keep Russia in the program. We might not. I would prefer to work with the Administration, but we cannot keep waiting for leadership that may never come.

Return to NASA Watch