Mr. Schiff: Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Chairman, I rise to join my colleague and neighbor from California in his praise for your leadership as well as the leadership of the gentleman from West Virginia and to urge that we turn back the Senate's proposals which I believe will seriously undermine the Solar System Exploration Program.
Mr. Chairman, as you know, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, Caltech. The Senate makes three proposals that are damaging to Caltech, damaging to NASA and damaging to the space program. The first is the transfer of telecommunications and mission operations to an outside contractor, as discussed by my colleague; the second is the reduction of $50 million from the Mars Surveyor program; and the third is the transfer of the Europa mission and the entire Solar System Exploration Program from JPL to an ad hoc grants program.
The combined impacts on JPL of these three proposals would be the elimination of 1,200 jobs at JPL and the resulting elimination of highly trained personnel and unnecessarily imperil our Nation's space exploration program.
Essentially, the Senate proposes that the critical mass of talent, experience and know-how which resides at JPL should be dispersed and that the core of NASA's exploration program should be conducted piecemeal and ad hoc.
At a time when the Nation is facing a critical shortage of experienced personnel in public service, the Senate proposals would terminate hundreds of engineers, technicians and scientists who possess the greatest level of knowledge regarding space exploration. The consequences would be tragic, and the Nation's space program would suffer a tremendous setback.
Mr. Chairman, I am proud to represent the best and brightest in a field where the advancement of science inspires young children and captures the imagination of millions, but I believe the space exploration program at JPL also serves the Nation as a whole.
NASA's solar exploration program carefully laid out and scrutinized resides at JPL because for the past 50 years this Congress has invested in the creation of the talent and infrastructure that exists at JPL. They are the experts, and this is rocket science.
For this body to allow that investment in space exploration to be jeopardized in this manner would be a disservice to the Nation and contrary to the fiscal duty we owe taxpayers.