Sen. Ted Cruz is ready to chair the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness.
“Our mindset should be focused on NASA’s primary mission: exploring space and developing the wealth of new technologies that stem from its exploration,” Cruz said in a statement Wednesday.
The Texas Republican also made it clear that the subcommittee will refocus the government’s focus to “investment on the hard sciences, on getting men and women into space, on exploring low-Earth orbit and beyond, and not on political distractions that are extraneous to NASA’s mandate.”
Cruz, who was appointed on Jan. 8, said Monday that the Obama administration has an anti-NASA stance.
“One of the problems with the Obama administration is that it has degraded NASA. It has degraded for space exploration, degraded manned exploration because the Obama administration has undervalued that and shifted to funding other priorities,” he said in a statement. “It shifted the funding to global warming pursuits rather than carry out NASA’s core mission.”
Cruz was the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the last Congress. He has in the past butted heads with Senate Democrats over NASA funding.
“Sen. Cruz has played to the most extreme elements of his party on climate. NASA is a dispassionate, nonpartisan source of data on climate. It would be incredibly damaging if he decides to go on an ideological crusade against it,” Keith Gaby, communications director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate program, said in response to Cruz’s appointment on the subcommittee, according to the San Antonio-Express News.
NASA is set to receive $805 billion from the federal government in fiscal year 2015, Spaceflight Now reported. Though it requested $848 million, the amount appropriated is the highest in five years.
