During a congressional hearing Thursday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had harsh words for the space agency—and the space policy crafted by President Obama's administration. Under the Obama administration's guidance, NASA has established Mars as a goal for human spaceflight and said that astronauts will visit the red planet by the 2030s. However, a growing number of critics say the agency’s approach is neither affordable nor sustainable.

On Thursday, Griffin, administrator of NASA from 2005 to 2009, joined those critics. The United States has not had a serious discussion about space policy, he testified, and as a result, the space agency is making little discernible progress. NASA simply cannot justify its claims of being on a credible path toward Mars, he added.

“To quote my friend and colleague Jim Albaugh, the now-retired CEO of Boeing Commercial Aircraft, the current administration’s view of our nation’s future in space offers ‘no dream, no vision, no plan, no budget, and no remorse,’” Griffin said during a hearing of the House Science Committee. “We must remedy this matter with all deliberate speed.”

The Republican chairman of the Science Committee, Lamar Smith of Texas, echoed those concerns in his comments, saying that under President Obama, NASA does not seem to be taking a serious approach to human exploration. The hearing comes at a critical time for NASA, now two months into the last year of President Obama’s second term and with a new administrator likely to replace Charles Bolden in 2017. Republicans in Congress have made it clear they do not favor the president’s plan to send astronauts to visit a fragment of an asteroid near the Moon and an eventual journey to Mars.

In fact, legislators appear to support returning to the Moon as a stepping stone en route to exploration deeper into the solar system. That was evident by the choice of witnesses for the hearing, including Griffin, who strongly called for a US-led international partnership to develop a permanent human presence on the Moon.

Another witness, retired astronaut Eileen Collins, echoed what most current and former astronauts also appear to believe: that the Moon is a good training ground for missions deeper into space. As a pilot and commander of multiple space shuttle missions, she said most of her colleagues favor such an incremental approach. “When asked about how best to prepare for a successful Mars mission, as a crew member, I certainly would like to see the hardware tested on the Moon’s surface first,” Collins testified. “This is part of a test plan’s build-up approach. Policy leaders are asking astronauts to risk their lives on space journeys, and it is our experience that testing in similar environments will minimize risk.”

The overall purpose of Thursday’s hearing was to discuss leadership and stability at NASA, which often sees a policy whiplash every four to eight years when a new president comes into the White House. That certainly was the case in 2009, when President Obama turned NASA away from Griffin's choice of the Moon toward the asteroid belt and an eventual Mars mission.

However NASA’s partners on the International Space Station have been slow to embrace this move. During the last year, European Space Agency Director General Johann-Dietrich Wörner has in fact broken from NASA by speaking of establishing a “Moon Village.” A growing number of US companies are interested in supplying such an effort and using a lunar base to mine for ice and other resources. These resources might then serve as a cache of fuel and other supplies for exploration to Mars.

To bring stability, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), has proposed legislation ( HR 2093 ) that he says would make NASA more professional and less political. The bill would appoint a NASA administrator for 10 years instead of having him or her serving at the behest of the president. It would also reduce the influence of the White House Office of Management and Budget on space policy by having NASA’s board of directors submit a budget request directly to Congress.

During the hearing on Thursday, Culberson noted that NASA has spent $20 billion on canceled spaceflight programs and that this has proved very damaging to morale at Johnson Space Center in Houston as well as other field centers. “We need to ensure that we take the politics out of science and provide NASA with clear direction and guidance that outlasts the political whims of any one presidential administration—and the political whims of Congress,” Culberson said.

Culberson’s predecessor as chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee with oversight of NASA’s budget, Frank Wolf, also proposed similar legislation before. It did not advance. The new bill may suffer the same fate, but Thursday’s hearing clearly demonstrated Congressional dissatisfaction with NASA’s current human spaceflight efforts.

Although space has not been an issue during the presidential primary process and is unlikely to bubble up during the general election, it seems that the next president and an unhappy Congress will have quite a bit to say about the direction NASA takes in 2017. At this point, that direction looks to include a more serious reassessment of the Moon as a proving ground for deeper exploration.