Abstract
We examine the principal-agent relationship between Congress and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Apollo program using an application of the congressional dominance theory. NASA received 4.4% of the federal budget, the highest share in its history, in 1966 but received approximately one percent less than a decade later. We consider how political incentives such as presidential favoritism and congressional jockeying affected NASA’s funding throughout the Space Race and up to the closure of the Apollo program in 1975. Using retention rates of the House Subcommittee on Manned Space Flight as a proxy for NASA’s political value, we find that the appropriation amount is an accurate measure of an agency’s political value but that the difference between an agency’s budget request and the congressional response is an inaccurate measure. We argue the congressional dominance model explains a general pattern in the relationship between Congress and NASA during the Space Race though one of the propositions of the model does not fit our historical analytical narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
On July 20, 1969, the lunar landing of Apollo 11 ended the Space Race (Compton 1988).
- 2.
The mission statement of the NACA was “to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution” (Digest 2011).
- 3.
On August 8, 1958, Eisenhower picked Keith Glennan, the president of the Case Institute of Technology (later, Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, as his nominee for NASA administrator. NACA Director Hugh Dryden took the position of Deputy Administrator at NASA. The Senate confirmed both nominations on August 14, 1958.
- 4.
NASA History Office (2013) asserts that Kennedy’s push for the space program was motivated not only by Gagarin’s success but also by the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
- 5.
There were no missions designated as Apollo 2 and Apollo 3. Apollo 4, Apollo 5, and Apollo 6 were unmanned missions (NASA History Office 2014).
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Acknowledgements
We thank participants of the 2017 Public Choice Society meeting, New Orleans, LA, for helpful comments on earlier drafts. We thank Justin Callais for his outstanding research assistance. An earlier version of this paper titled “Application and Extension of Congressional Dominance Theory: Evidence from the Space Race” was written as an honors thesis by William Maye under the supervision of Dr. Leo Krasnozhon and Father James Carter, S.J. The views of the authors do not represent the views of their respective employers.
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Krasnozhon, L., Maye, W. (2019). Economic History of the Relationship Between Congress and NASA: A Case Study of the Apollo Program. In: Hall, J., Witcher, M. (eds) Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History. Studies in Public Choice, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11313-1_7
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