With NASA under the thumb of the Russian space program, Congress continues to play political games with the space agency.

On Thursday the U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Committee unanimously approved the fiscal year 2015 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. This means they agreed upon a spending plan to fund NASA, among other agencies.

But buried within the bill could be something of a poison pill for a company like SpaceX. Allow me to explain.

The language in question is this:

The Committee directs NASA to maintain FAR 15.403-4, related to the certified cost and pricing data for prime contractors, for any contracts entered into support the development of a commercial crew vehicle.

Three companies are vying for NASA contracts to build smaller spacecraft to replace the space shuttle and give the United States its own transportation to the International Space Station. In a recent story I went into depth about the plight NASA finds itself in with regard to Russia. Anyway, these companies offer the best chance to fix that problem.

If this language is approved by the full Senate, and reconciled with the U.S. House budget bill, it would require the three companies, Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp., to provide detailed cost and financial information about their spacecraft. This represents a wholly new wrinkle in a contracting process NASA originally devised to allow private companies to develop spacecraft much more cheaply than they otherwise could have.

I had a chance to speak with four-time astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who heads up the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, about the effect of this language. He explains:

This was introduced by Senator Shelby, and to comply with this you have to have an infrastructure in place in your company to do that, which a company like Boeing certainly has, but SpaceX certainly does not have. More importantly if it became law on Oct. 1, and they hadn’t awarded the commercial crew contract by then, they would probably have to recompete it.

The contract to which he’s referring is CCtCap, which NASA is expected to award late this summer to one or more of the companies to allow them to complete development and testing of their spacecraft, and have them ready to begin flying U.S. astronauts to the space station in 2017. This is the contract that would break U.S. dependence upon Russian spacecraft.

Re-issuing the contract would mean up to another year’s delay in the program, buying another six Soyuz seats from the Russians for half a billion dollars, not to mention the geopolitical implications.

Shelby told Florida Today that the language was not intended to punish a company like SpaceX. “That’s not true,” he said. “We’re looking for transparency.”

But this doesn’t make much sense, Lopez-Alegria said:

It’s just inefficient. The whole idea behind the commercial crew progam is to not do a lot of the stuff that we have traditionally done only because we have always done it that way. It would be nice to be a little forward leaning, and to save taxpayer money. We’re trying to be more lean and efficient in our procurement. It’s just bad policy.

Shelby, in the past, has shown disdain the commercial crew program. This is because it has competed, within the NASA budget, for funding with the Space Launch System, the large rocket NASA is designing at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state of Alabama.