The newly appointed chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has inherited a financial quagmire. Massive cost overruns could prevent NASA from sending a full crew to the space station to carry out scientific research.
With a reputation as a longtime budget cutter and the first NASA administrator with a predominantly financial background, Sean O'Keefe has sparked fear among the scientists, academics, and space-policy analysts. They worry that the Bush administration is using the cost overruns to make wholesale cuts in the agency.
In his first comments to the press just days after taking office, O'Keefe said last week that no program or center was immune from cuts or closures, providing the starkest warning yet of another major overhaul of the troubled agency.
"It's all on the table," O'Keefe, a former deputy director of the U.S. budget office, said. "I don't have any preset solution of what the answer ought to be for any dimension of what we do here. It's an opportunity to think fresh about a variety of things."
His remarks are likely to intensify anxiety among NASA supporters who fear that cuts could dramatically diminish the nation's pre-eminent science and research institution, which has undergone a decade of downsizing. The number of NASA employees already has been cut from about 24,000 to 18,000.
O'Keefe was selected by President Bush to replace Daniel Goldin, NASA's longtime director who retired after 10 years and three presidents, leaving a leaner but still troubled agency.
"NASA has been cost cutting for years now, and the budget has not grown in the last decade," said Louis Freedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. "In terms of real dollars, the budget has shrunk, and the idea that the first priority is to shrink it more is scary."
A mess
Despite the fears, some analysts and former NASA employers privately wondered if O'Keefe could in fact clean up the financial mess at the space agency, long a repository for congressional pork barrel projects that have prevented serious restructuring in the past.
The agency has major centers scattered across the nation that were set up in its 1960s heyday, but the infrastructure is far greater than it needs to carry out its current space and aeronautical research programs.
Instead of cutting back, as the Pentagon has done, NASA has been forced to keep the 10 major centers open and staffed. Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has 3,100 government employees. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., a contract facility, has 5,430.
Closing centers could be his greatest challenge -- one that Goldin avoided breeching with Congress.
At O'Keefe's confirmation hearing last month, several congressmen cautioned him against trying to close centers in the way the Pentagon shuttered bases under the controversial base realignment and closure program, or BRAC.
"If you're going to NASA just for a BRAC-type arrangement, you're going to meet a lot of resistance from a lot of us here in this room," said Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. Mississippi is home to Stennis Space Center, the agency's smallest center with 284 employees.
'At this time'
For his part, O'Keefe said he has "made no judgment or conclusion at this time" about closing a center, although a White House-ordered review is expected to recommend closing at least one of the 10 facilities.
O'Keefe helped shape the administration's policy toward NASA as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, which in one of its reviews recommended slashing 1,000 civil jobs from the agency's human space flight program.
"He's a bean counter," said Charles Vick, a senior analyst for space policy at the Federation of American Scientists. "To a large degree, you do end up with fears whether he is ultimately going to end up being a butcher of NASA."
Analysts said O'Keefe's appointment is the Bush administration's response to the stunning acknowledgment by NASA early last year that the construction of the international space station was running nearly $5 billion over budget.