The Discretionary Freeze

Speaking in Florida, John McCain offered a fair ding on Barack Obama for some space-related flip flops: “I know that earlier this year, Senator Obama proposed cutting the NASA budget and delaying the timetable for our return to the Moon and the Mars mission. I believe that he later repudiated his own plan.” That went on, naturally, to make a character-based attack on Obama as an untrustworthy flip-flopper. Considering McCain’s flip-flops on big issues like taxes, immigration, and climate it’s a bit rich to suggest some kind of deep-seated character flaw based on a waffle over something as minor as NASA but that’s life. Then McCain said something more interestingly, namely “Let me say, just in case Senator Obama does decide to return to his original plan of cutting NASA funding – I oppose such cuts.”

Now I think Obama was right the first time to think that reducing funding for manned space exploration and concentrating our efforts instead on scientific research was smart. But be that as it may, Ben Furnas rightly observes that John McCain has committed himself to a “discretionary spending freeze” that would provide for real cuts in funding levels for NASA — $370 million in 2010 if we assume projections of a 2.1 percent inflation rate are correct.

This is, of course, a perfectly general point. Domestic discretionary funding is not that enormous a share of the overall spending pie, but it constitutes a very large share of the overall number of programs. McCain proposes to cut them all — from NASA to housing assistance to national parks to food safety inspections to civil rights enforcement to federal marshals to whatever else you care to name. That issue probably hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. If McCain were to announce, day-by-day, his planned cuts to each and every program he’s planning to cut those things would each garner some coverage. But instead by failing to enumerate the cuts, they escape scrutiny. McCain can even give speeches denying he wants to cut programs that he has, in fact, proposed cutting. And nobody asks him questions like why, exactly, is it smart to cut funding for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS isn’t an expensive operation. And while I suppose we could get by without accurate information about economic conditions in the United States, it seems like something we should want. Has the desirability of obtaining accurate statistical information declined? Did the National Weather Service do something to merit cuts? Are we no longer interesting in the US Attorneys’ efforts to enforce the law?