NASA Budget: Ratchet One

In a normal “budget season” President Nixon’s December 26 decisions regarding the NASA FY1971 budget would have been the end of the pro­cess until the budget was made public a month or so later. But this was not normal year in budget-making. Nixon’s December 26 budget choices had a lifetime of only a few days. The increasingly detailed involvement of Flanigan and his assistant Tom Whitehead during the preceding month had convinced them that additional reductions to the NASA budget could be made without undercutting the president’s space priorities. Flanigan had not been present at the December 26 meeting when Nixon had approved the $3.7 billion NASA budget, and in its aftermath suggested to Ehrlichman that a lower NASA budget was both desirable and feasible. In addition, Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s top assistant for Congressional relations, advised the president that a NASA budget at a $3.7 billion level was likely to run into opposition in the Congress. Based on this counsel, the issue of the NASA budget level was reopened at the end of December; within the first few days of January, the NASA budget was “ratcheted” down to a lower level.

The involvement of Flanigan and especially Whitehead in the budget pro­cess had begun in late November and intensified throughout December. There was little precedent for such intense White House policy staff involve­ment; this was traditionally seen as the role of the BOB. But Richard Nixon, with his desire to control major decisions from the White House and his dis­trust of the Washington “permanent government” epitomized by the career staff of BOB, supported involving his White House staff in budget decisions with major policy implications. The result was a significant level of tension between the White House staff and the BOB staff, with neither side helping the other and very little communication between the two. Personal antago­nism between Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Flanigan on one hand and Mayo on the other only exacerbated the situation.

As BOB was preparing its recommendations on the NASA budget in November, Flanigan and Whitehead had been monitoring the wide differ­ences between NASA and BOB on the budget’s level and content. They judged that neither NASA nor BOB was likely to develop budget choices that met the president’s rather unclear priorities. Flanigan had communicated this perspective to Nixon and got clearance to begin developing alternate options. Given this guidance, Whitehead “turned with a vengeance” toward that task.29 In a December 2 white paper, he observed that decisions with respect to the FY1971 were “particularly important,” since “deceptively small budget issues for FY71 entail enormous (up to $100 billion) budget commitments for future years.” Even so, he thought “the issues and options that have been defined for the President and the information to support them are scarcely up to the quality appropriate for a Presidential decision.” He summarized the situation as he perceived it: [5]

program” and robotic planetary exploration mission such as the Grand Tour.

• “Manned lunar landings have been scheduled at the rate of three per year at a cost of almost $1 billion per year over a rate of one per year, without this issue ever being presented for Presidential consideration.”

• “The Budget Bureau has consistently been uncooperative in White House staff efforts to produce information on lower-cost options for Presidential consideration.” In Whitehead’s view, the BOB career staff seemed “to suf­fer from an institutional tendency to save the President and his staff from hard decisions, to compromise with agencies as far as possible, then to defend the agency base.”30

It was quite unusual for White House policy staff to be delving into the technical details needed to craft and then cost out alternative programs in an executive agency. Whitehead peppered NASA with questions with respect to various “building blocks” for alternative programs. A veteran NASA official, skeptical of this activity, noted that the White House people “came up with impossible alternatives. . . They couldn’t understand why. . . even though it would take you less than four months to check out and launch a vehicle, why you basically couldn’t launch it [only] once a year.”31

In his analysis of the FY1971 budget situation, Whitehead made three additional observations:

• “While the space program is interesting to most of the public, it ranks very low in their priorities for increased Federal spending.” Whitehead suggested that “there is no space program or mission on the horizon that offers popular appeal comparable to the first lunar landing, so that space is not likely to climb in the public eye as a desirable use of Federal funds.”

• Whitehead was skeptical of the political arguments in support of a high Apollo launch rate, noting that “it is unclear how much domestic and international political benefit accrues to the President and the Nation at the higher launch rates. . . A major consideration is avoidance of another Sputnik-like event, but we now appear far ahead of the Soviets.” He added “the existing supply of 8 Saturn 5 vehicles potentially could be stretched to cover 9 years of manned activities.”

• Finally, Whitehead observed that “there is no need now to make pro­gram commitments in order to preserve the 1986 Mars landing option.” Richard Nixon in the aftermath of receiving the STG report and again as he discussed the NASA FY1971 budget had indicated that he wanted to preserve that option. Whitehead added “the President can at any time make a forward-looking statement on the future of the space program without any large funding commitments.”32

Flanigan’s late December intervention in the NASA budget process had an immediate effect. BOB Deputy Director Schlesinger on December 29 informed his NASA unit that it had to find a way to cut the agency’s budget by $1 billion, likely as a reaction to the intervention by Flanigan and Whitehead. Working overnight, the unit was able to come up with $800 mil­lion in possible cuts. These cuts were apparently too draconic. Meeting with Nixon on the morning of December 30, Mayo and Ehrlichman decided that the NASA budget would be cut by “only” $225 million. Nixon agreed, say­ing that it should be made known that he was ordering these budget cuts to “slow down and stretch out” the post-Apollo space effort, reflecting a re-ordering of the priority of space compared to other national efforts, and that he had rejected the recommendation of the STG for a “crash program to Mars,” even though sending people to Mars remained the “long-range goal.”33 Paine was called to the White House on the afternoon of December 30 to get the news of additional budget cuts, not from Mayo but from Flanigan and Bryce Harlow.

Paine and his associates spent New Year’s weekend revising the NASA budget to meet the new expenditure limit. Paine wrote Mayo on January 2, 1970, telling the budget director that Flanigan had “made it clear that the controlling decision was the necessity to hold NASA FY1971 outlays to $3,600 million.” Paine informed Mayo that he and Flanigan had agreed that NASA would be free to revise its plans as it chose, as long as the result was $3.6 billion in outlays (the funds actually spent during the year). Paine told Mayo “that I would, of course, accept and meet this expenditure limitation like a good soldier. . . provided that I have the flexibility to adjust program details and budget authority.” Still pushing for approval of the STG recom­mended program, Paine added “this is the year, and the FY1971 budget is the instrument, in which President Nixon’s initiatives in space will go on the record books.” Paine’s letter was apparently the first time Mayo had heard of the agreement that Flanigan had made with NASA; he felt “double – crossed.”34

Then Flanigan wrote Paine and Mayo on January 6, laying down several conditions that NASA had to meet:

1. “The Manned Space Flight Program will be carried out on the previously agreed-upon schedule” of two launches per year.

2. “There is no commitment, implied or otherwise, for development starts for either the space station or the shuttle in FY72.”

3. “The President’s option with regard to the final Saturn 5 launch, as to whether it will be a lunar mission or a second Experimental Space Station is still open.”35

These supposedly final decisions on the NASA budget soon became known to the Washington space community. The Washington Post headlined a front page story on January 11 “Nixon Rejects Big Outlay for Space in the ’70s.” Paine felt that it was important in terms of the morale of the NASA and contractor workforce to provide some insight into what was going on, and on January 9 and again on January 12 urged Flanigan to allow him to make a statement “explaining the actions we’re taking in the most positive way.” Paine on January 12 sent a draft of the statement he proposed to make the next day to the White House for approval. The statement was heavily edited to remove any indication that the statement was being made at the president’s request and to delete sentences such as “the President accepts the recommendations of the Space Task Group as our basic space plan for the 1970’s.” Indeed, there was no mention of the STG in Paine’s statement as issued. According to George Low, there were times in the days just before January 13 when the White House vacillated regarding the wisdom of mak­ing the statement at all, and White House edits “were in part substantive (e. g. don’t talk about manned Mars landings or the grand tour) and in part were more or less nit-picking.” Final approval of the statement came only 30 minutes before Paine’s 2:00 p. m. January 13 press conference at which it was to be released. At the press conference Paine tried to put a positive spin on the impact of what he termed an “austere” NASA budget, but the headline the next day in The New York Times said “50,000 NASA Jobs to Be Eliminated.” (The 50,000 number included both NASA civil servants and contractor employees.)36

With the agreement with Flanigan on budget levels and constraints and with the January 13 press conference, NASA had good reason to believe that its FY1971 budget had at last been finalized. That turned out not to be the case.