Based in Washington, Jen manages Aviation Week’s worldwide defense, space and security coverage.
Prior to taking on her current role, Jen was Aviation Week's Congressional Editor. Jen came to Aviation Week in March 2011 from Politico, where she covered the intersection of defense and politics. She also worked as a reporter and editor for Defense Daily, Inside the Army, The Other Paper and The Columbus Dispatch.
Jen received a Master’s degree in journalism as a Kiplinger Fellow at the Ohio State University. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in history and journalism from the University of Michigan.
With a lingering stalemate on the deficit and debt ceiling and leftover problems from the previous fiscal year, developing a budget to fund NASA for the coming fiscal year is messier than usual. “It’s a quagmire,” says Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Commerce Justice Science subcommittee. “It’s a fiscal quagmire.” The committee is still sorting through the fiscal 2011 budget, as NASA only just recently submitted its spending plan for fiscal 2011 to Congress.
The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee voted for the panel’s version of a bill to authorize defense spending in fiscal 2012, but he just might vote “no” when the bill comes before the full Senate. In a statement included in a committee report on the Senate panel’s defense authorization bill, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says the bill does not go far enough to stop cost overruns on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and contains “unrequested pork-barrel projects” totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
U.S. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) makes no secret of the fact that he is out to reform the Transportation Security Administration (TSA): “My goal is to get them out of the passenger screening business and into the security business,” Mica says.
