Barbara Mikulski to retire

Barbara Mikulski, the Democrat Senator for Maryland who often fought for funding for NASA, has announced she will leave the Senate in 2016.

A senator since 1977, Mikulski has long served on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, which oversees the budgets of NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agencies. She has been a staunch defender of NASA’s Goddard facility in Maryland and programs connected to it, in particular the James Webb Space Telescope and large parts of NASA’s Earth science mission.

In 2014, Mikulski, who was the first woman to head the Senate Appropriations committee, called federal research funding “an investment in America’s future” and her subcommittee passed a bill that year to increase the NSF’s funding.