THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 19, 1995 TAG: 9507190409
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN AND MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton and two other major NASA facilities targeted for closure got a new lease on life Tuesday in the House Appropriations Committee.
The panel, meeting in closed session, voted unanimously to overturn a subcommittee's plan to shut Langley, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama by 1998.
Instead, congressional aides said, the committee wants NASA to submit a detailed report by March 31, 1996, on ways to further trim spending. The committee also approved restrictions that would keep NASA from closing any of its centers without congressional authorization, said Dan Scandling, an aide to U.S. Rep. Herbert H. Bateman of Newport News. Langley is in Bateman's district.
Bateman had predicted this last week, when the subcommittee first talked about shutting the centers. But nothing was certain until the full committee met.
The Hampton facility still will lose jobs. Earlier this year, NASA announced a plan to eliminate 1,000 of Langley's 4,500 positions by the end of the decade. And officials said 400 more jobs here could be affected by a reduction in funds for ``Mission to Planet Earth,'' a long-term plan to use satellites to track signs of environmental decline on the planet by measuring changes like ozone depletion. The program lost about $332 million.
Most of that work takes place at Goddard in Maryland, but Langley has been contributing some of the monitoring instruments.
Langley's rescue was a relief to the center's director, Paul F. Holloway. He said he was upset, however, that his employees had been pawns in a political game.
``You had 4,500 people . . . plus all their families, that had to go into a great deal of stress for an extended period because of this,'' Holloway said.
A variety of political motives have been blamed for the proposal to ax Langley and the other centers. Some have said Congress was trying to send a message to NASA that the agency needs a tighter budget; others that the subcommittee chairman was making a dramatic bid for more money to dole out to NASA and other agencies.
Tuesday's committee action happened at the start of the panel's discussions on 1996 appropriations for NASA and a variety of other federal agencies. NASA was allotted about $13.7 billion next year - about 5 percent less than the agency needs.
A spokeswoman for NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin said Tuesday that Goldin would have no comment on the full committee action.
But Holloway said the committee's demand for more cuts from NASA didn't sit well with an agency that already has planned massive reductions. Clinton's administration ordered NASA to slice almost $40 billion over the next five years.
``We've done our share,'' Holloway said. by CNB