Diverting NASA Funds to Education: What Will That Accomplish?

We go through this every election cycle or so: some candidate wants to make a push for more education so they go to NASA for the money. NASA’s funding is a pretty small fraction of the federal budget in the U.S., as you can see from the chart below (that shows budgets for the past few years). Yet, it stimulates many sectors beyond space exploration and astronomy.

Notice that the Department of Education gets $61 billion dollars. The Department of Transportation gets $56 Billion. More than $400 billion goes to debt servicing. And, Defense gets $$600 billion while Health and Human Services gets nearly $700 Billion. Curiously, I just read a web page that traces the “faith based funding” initiatives in this country, a noble if perhaps vaguely unconstitutional use of taxpayer money.  In 2004, such funding, which now appears to be money spent to help the government meddle in Americans’ spiritual and intimate lives while purporting to help them out of poverty, etc., was promised access to $40 billion of taxpayer funds. This year (2008) the “faith-based” budget is down to $75 million, and apparently now that it’s a community initiative and not-as-faith-based as it used to be, they get less. And, there’s this little matter of a war that we’re paying for, moving into the $1.2 trillion dollar range.(That’s T for Trillion folks… enough money to fund education several times over, with some to spare for infrastructure upgrades and health care.)

So, how does tossing a small portion (a few hundred million) of the NASA budget (as Obama wants to do to postpone the Constellation project) help education? I’d challenge every candidate to answer that question because diverting that little bit to an education budget that is many times the size of the amounts Obama wants to take from an already-thin NASA budget is very much like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. And for no good reason. If education is truly broken and $61 billion isn’t fixing it, then an additional few hundred million taken from an agency that is already doing its best to keep the country on a forward-looking footing just doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, there’s some political or other reason why you would want to do this. Are there benefactors looking to make book on this diversion of funds?  Political paybacks disguised as “reality”?

The future of this country, not just in space exploration, but in technological development AND education is just too important to play base politics with. If you don’t have the jobs at NASA (or in other tech sectors that NASA drives) then what exactly are you educating the kids for, Mr. and Mrs. Candidate for President/Senate/House? Read more about Obama’s push to shovel money from NASA to education here.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t strengthen education or that money shouldn’t go to community-based groups to help those in need. We already have programs to do that and we should work to make them accessible to all Americans who need it (without the preaching), and run more efficiently.

But, cutting NASA, an agency that is, essentially, growing our technological seed corn for us, is not the way to do it. I suggest the candidates (Obama in particular, but they’re all in need of a wakeup call), look elsewhere first. And figure out how to lead the U.S. with forward-looking 21st-century ideas, not worn-out 20th-century memes.

Chart from Federal Budget.com

Do your own research on how much money our government spends in which sectors by Googling such terms as “NASA budget”, “US budget”, “war spending”, “Hillary NASA” “Obama NASA” and other terms that will help you understand what our tax dollars go for.