Rick Tumlinson has some space policy advice for the White House. As one of the people in attendance at the meeting last fall that Rick mentioned (and who has signed off on the consensus document that resulted), I encourage you to read the whole thing.

I doubt if they’ll pay any attention, though. I think that this administration’s space policy is pretty firmly fixed now, absent some new unexpected event (e.g., another Shuttle loss, assuming that it ever flies again), and there are many more critical issues to them at this point, both from the standpoint of the national interest and electorally. I suspect that they think that space policy is currently one of those things that ain’t broke, so there’s no need to fix it, relative to more pressing concerns. I think that the best we can hope for, at this point, is that the policy is sufficiently non-hostile to private enterprise that current NASA activities and expenditures won’t hold things back too much. This is not to say that NASA isn’t doing useful things for the private sector, but the amount of resources being expended in that direction, relative to those being spent on centralized (and ultimately unaffordable and unsustainable) fifteen-year plans, remain tragic.