NASA will trim from the bottom to accommodate a half-billion-dollar hole in its expected funding this year, halting or shrinking low-priority programs to keep top-dollar efforts like the Orion crew exploration vehicle and International Space Station assembly on track.

With scant hope for a loophole in the year-long continuing resolution ordered by the new appropriations chairmen in the Democratic 110th Congress, Administrator Michael Griffin says his choices are clear.

"We will find what we believe are the lowest priority half-billion dollars in content, and we'll extract it, across the agency," he says, stressing that does not mean programs at the core of the redirected U.S. space program as defined by President Bush almost three years ago.

"I will do everything I can to keep Orion and Ares I on schedule," he says. "That will be right behind keeping shuttle and station on track, and then after that we'll fill up the bucket with our other priorities."

Although NASA asked for almost $16.8 billion this fiscal year and planned accordingly, Congress hasn't passed its fiscal 2007 appropriation and doesn't intend to. Instead, under the continuing-resolution plan developed by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the new appropriations committee chairmen, most of the government will operate under its fiscal 2006 funding levels.

The Byrd/Obey plan also includes a no-earmark rule, which knifes a $1 billion add-on proposed last year by Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) to "pay back" NASA the cost of returning the space shuttle to flight after the Columbia accident. So the agency will have about $520 million less than it expected in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

Wiggle room

As with everything in Congress, there is some wiggle room. Capitol Hill aides say the fiscal 2007 continuing resolution probably will be drafted to give federal managers more flexibility to shuffle money between programs to cover shortfalls. And the fiscal 2008 budget, which is due out Feb. 5, also will give government agencies an opportunity to play catch-up.

But this year the money has to come from somewhere, and in an interview with sister publication Aviation Week & Space Technology on Jan. 10, Griffin gave his view on where that should be.

"The ideal candidate is a fairly new, lower priority effort where not a lot of money has already been invested, and by stopping it now you can react and not have to spend future money that you know you're not going to get," he says. "If we don't find the ideal candidate we'll look for less ideal candidates."