It is going to be a very long summer for the US Congress. The House of Representatives voted on June 3 to approve a spending bill that would dramatically reshape research priorities at NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)—drawing protest from the White House and previewing fiscal battles to come.
US President Barack Obama has already threatened to veto the legislation, citing specific concerns over proposed spending cuts to the development of a NASA mission to Mars, the space agency’s Earth-science research, and weather-satellite programmes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“It’s a Mars-and-Venus scenario right now,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. “In this case, Capitol Hill’s from Mars, and the White House is from Venus.”
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