Washington ? When House and Senate budget negotiators announced a deal on a massive $328 billion federal spending bill, lawmakers proudly noted that they had funded NASA at the amount requested by President Bush in February.

But a closer look at the $15.5 billion bill shows that budget writers axed more than $300 million from NASA’s budget request and replaced those dollars with money for line items of their own choosing. Many of them are hometown “pork” projects that win legislators political favor at home but no fans inside the federal agencies they affect.

For example, the proposed budget slices $200 million from the international space station program and $70 million from the Space Launch Initiative, part of NASA’s effort to develop a next-generation spacecraft. An additional $20 million came from Project Prometheus, a key element of the agency’s hopes of finding a way to convert nuclear energy into electricity for in-space propulsion and power.

In place of those funds, lawmakers stuffed in an assortment of projects, spreading federal dollars across the country.

The U.S. House is supposed to vote on the spending bill today. The Senate may take it up this week, although Democrats are threatening to block a vote until January.

A bunch of bacon

Some of these “earmarks,” such as a $1.9 million line item for infrastructure repairs at Kennedy Space Center, can’t really be called pork. But there is more than $220 million in bacon in the NASA portion of the budget bill.

The projects are as varied as $3 million for an astronomy center in Hawaii and $4.5 million for a new science center at St. Bonaventure University in New York to $3 million for “ocean and weather research” at the University of Alaska — home of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

On heels of tragedy

All of this comes in a year when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration suffered one of its darkest moments, the Feb. 1 loss of the space shuttle Columbia, and when many legislators have openly criticized the space agency’s budget as insufficient.

“It shows you that no agency, no program is sacred and is protected from the appropriators,” said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based nonpartisan group.

Here are the projects that were cut:

• $200 million from the international space station’s reserve fund.
• $70 million from the Space Launch Initiative, an ongoing effort to develop new spacecraft.
• $20 million from Project Prometheus, NASA’s highly touted effort to develop in-space nuclear propulsion and power generation.
• $11 million from a global climate-change research program.
• $10 million from the Beyond Einstein program, an effort to look at major science questions, such as what powered the big bang.
• $8 million from the Space Interferometry Mission, scheduled to launch in 2009.