An emergency $700 billion financial industry bailout package that a worried, hurried Congress wrote to stave off a global economic disaster may serve to further tighten finances of many federal programs, including missile defense and NASA.

Even before action on the gigantic rescue package, which exceeds annual defense spending including war outlays, the fiscal situation confronting the government was grim.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in its most recent report released this month, presented a picture of record red ink on government budget ledgers, with budget deficits totaling $438 billion in the fiscal year 2009 beginning Wednesday, and a similar amount in fiscal 2010.

While the projections foresee a sharp drop in budget deficits thereafter, that assumes that the gargantuan tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 will expire automatically beginning in 2010, as President Bush and Congress provided in writing those measures.

However, Republicans on Capitol Hill are pressing hard to extend them, with Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, calling for triple the amount of tax cuts in the next decade compared to the amount of cuts in the current decade ($6.4 trillion that McCain is proposing, compared to the roughly $2 trillion that Bush tax cuts were estimated to cost when they were enacted).

Before the $700 billion bailout bill was introduced in Congress, many agencies already were under strain.

For example, for several years, critics of ballistic missile defense (BMD) have attempted to cut funding below requested levels for missile shield programs still in development, such as the Airborne Laser, Kinetic Energy Interceptor and the proposed European Missile Defense system.

At NASA, the space agency still hasn’t been reimbursed for the funds — well more than $2 billion — that it had to shift from other programs to meet costs of recovering from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 that saw the loss of the shuttle and its crew of seven. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.,) head of a key appropriations panel overseeing NASA, has fought doggedly for years to have just half of that money, about $1 billion, reimbursed to the space agency. But thus far, Congress hasn’t stepped up to the plate for that.

Further, because of money constraints, a decision was made years ago to stop flying the space shuttles in 2010, even though the next-generation Orion-Ares spaceship system won’t have its first manned flight until half a decade later. That means putting U.S. astronauts into Russia Soyuz spaceships to get them off the ground.

And a $1.5 billion multi-national experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, has been sitting uselessly on the ground for lack of a way transport it to the International Space Station, until Congress just now intervened. (Please see stories in this issue.)

Many critics say NASA science programs are sorely underfunded, too.

Some lawmakers are concerned that rather than seeing any improvement, federal finances for these and other programs will only worsen, as the $700 billion bailout package drives federal deficits far higher, and a nose-diving economy cuts federal tax revenues. Also, as unemployment rises, deficits will worsen even more as spending on the jobless increases.

To be sure, the $700 billion won’t all be spent at once. Rather, lawmakers decided to apply the brakes and have it doled out in segments. As well, if the assets of stricken financial institutions rebound in price, the government eventually may be able to sell them to the private sector for no net loss, or even at a profit. But if these troubled assets don’t rebound to fetch high prices, the federal government will be out $350 billion, even if it manages to recoup half of its investment.

Clearly, in the next couple of years, the financial impact will be negative for federal finances, and for the hundreds of programs that have to be supported by Uncle Sam.