Congress should counter veto threats from a stingy President Bush by passing a continuing budget resolution freezing NASA funding for half a year, and then pass a budget with spending increases after a new, hopefully more supportive president takes office in January.

That was the view of Sen. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee commerce, justice, science and related agencies subcommittee. He spoke before the National Academy of Sciences, explaining why the advisory group is seeing only a fraction of its recommended space and science programs funded each year, including in the next fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2009.

Rather than funding programs that deserve it, Bush has used veto threats to force Congress into "a zero sum game," in which more funding can be found for one deserving program only by stealing it from another, Mollohan said.

Bush used this strategy last year to rip funds from many programs, and he’s doing it again this year, vowing to veto any spending bill that exceeds his budget plan, Mollohan said.

While the instinct is for each interested group to fight for funding its programs, Mollohan had a message for the space and science communities: Stop the zero-sum game, and turn your fire power on the real problem: an overall lack of funds.

What is needed, critically, is to raise the total amount of money available, "the top-line number to allow all programs to move forward," he said.

Mollohan said he wants to use the continuing resolution stratagem to avoid a repeat this year of the frustration last year. Then, Congress moved legislation to fund several programs at a level $23 billion more than Bush requested. Under a veto threat, Congress cut $12 billion from those programs. And then, under a persistent veto warning, lawmakers cut another $12 billion, so programs received only what Bush requested.

"We could not have overridden a veto, so we took another $12 billion out," he recalled.

In devising a game plan for this year, he and other legislative leaders decided, "Why go through that drill" again?

So, he advised, those in the space and science community should expect to see a continuing resolutions with funds frozen at fiscal 2008 levels through the first half of fiscal 2009.

But then, he said, a new Congress and new president can enact legislation that will provide some decent funding increases.

"I hope in the new year we have resources" to support needed programs adequately, he said.