The House NASA-HUD-VA subcommittee just approved a budget that gives NASA $1 billion less than the presidential request.

Specifically:

-- kills funding for the Crew Exploration Vehicle

-- Kills funding for Project Prometheus (the nuclear propulsion intiative -- no surprise there)

-- kills funding for various other new initiatives

Fully funds the shuttle request (though that appears to low given recent return-to-flight cost increases)

Fully funds the Mars robotic exploration request

The bill also imposes a significant reduction in the request for the National Science Foundation, and some signficant cuts in EPA. It does not cut housing programs as much as the White House requested.

Mostly, though, the money is taken up by a multi-billion increase in Veteran's programs, nearly a 10% increase on last year's spending for veteran's health and retirement programs.

By the way, this shows exactly what is wrong with those "fraction of federal spending" poll questions. They do NOT ask people to make tradeoffs. The proper question would be, would you support 1% for NASA, if it meant cutting (fill in the blank), or raising taxes.

When you ask those "% of budget" questions, you quickly find that people would allocate 200% or 300% of current spending. Does that mean they'd like to see federal taxes doubled? No, just that you need explicit tradeoff questions to get meaningful data.

The real question is how support for NASA funding compares to support for spending on other programs, and from my knowledge of polls, NASA does pretty well, probably above average, but by no means is it on top. There isn't going to be much support for funding NASA by cutting Veteran's spending during a war that is creating thousands of new amputees to care for.