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YOU CAN hardly blame George W. for giving Americans a large tax cut: after
all that’s why many people voted for him. But science might pay heavily. NASA
has just found out its next budget rise will not match inflation. In other
words, it’s been cut
(see p 4).
Now, a hard pruning can be a good thing.
Carefully done, it can give an old plant new life. But you need to know what to
cut and what to leave behind. It’s not yet clear if Bush has grasped these
subtleties. The word from the Bush seems to be “find the cash to cover the tax
cuts now and we’ll worry about the details later”.

One of the White House’s proposals is to make the space station smaller than
originally intended. This plan would leave room for only three astronauts to
keep the station ticking over. But the whole point of having a space station is
to do space science. We could end up with the absurdity of a fully functioning
lab with nobody free to run it.

To be fair, NASA hasn’t helped itself. It’s gone way over budget on several
projects, including the space station, and has hung onto dead-end projects like
the X-33 reusable launch vehicle. All the more reason then for a sensible
strategy and careful pruning. But on strategy there’s a deafening silence.
Nobody seems to know what Bush wants from space or science, perhaps he doesn’t
either. A new NASA boss would be a good start—better still would be a
Presidential science adviser.