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NASA IG Paints Bleak Picture For Agency Projects
coondoggie writes "The bottom line for NASA as well as any number of government agencies in this new era of sequestration is money — and NASA in this case has too many programs chasing too few dollars. That is just one of a number of bleak conclusions NASA's Inspector General Paul Martin laid out to a Congressional hearing adding that 'declining budgets and fiscal uncertainties present the most significant external challenges to NASA's ability to successfully move forward on its many projects and programs. For the first 6 months of this year, NASA has operated under a continuing resolution that funds the Agency at last year's level of $17.8 billion. Moreover, NASA's share of the Government-wide sequestration cuts reduce that spending authority by $894 million.'"
You get one small point in time where your budget isn't automatically increased and it's an "era" of sequestration?
Self-entitled sons of bitches. Get out there and EARN a living. RUN a business that isn't propped up by the backs of hard-working people.
You'll just develop drones to spy on us anyway,
Douche.
The host is dying. Get used to it and produce something worthwhile, parasite.
Since ?? Wall Street and Too Big To Fail banks have sucked all the BIG capital into the pockets of a few !! And you let them !!
Given NASA's constant funding problems for the last few decades, by this point all the talented engineers and researchers would of left. Also with the current political environment of focusing spending on the War on Terror related projects and social support, I would be surprised if there will be any increase in budget allocation to the space-related sciences.
At this rate, is there any meaningful hope left for NASA, JPL or indeed any government-funded space-related agencies?
$894 million is a lot of money, but out of a budget of $17.8 billion, NASA has to figure out how to do with 5% less.
It works for everyone else!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Do not look into the bright side of the Sun with remaining eye.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If you want to talk about "eras", we should talk about the "era" of relying on the government for access to space being just about over now.
NASA is doing some good work still but properly they should be scaled back, as private companies move now to take us into space far cheaper than NASA ever could. The sequestration cuts are tiny compared to the reductions that make sense for them now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Welcome to the new USA "Austerity." It wasn't officially passed, it came in the back door.
Sequestration, BY LAW, only applies to discretionary funds. There are, built into the law, programs that are "uncuttable", and yes, they are generally about half of total expenditures.
And you fundamentally don't understand how government research agencies work. Employees at those agencies have to write proposals, just like every other researcher in the world, proving the usefulness and relevance of their work.
Cutting salaries would entail even more paperwork and bureaucratic overhead than furloughs, and furloughs have the added benefit of ensuring that the government doesn't artificially devalue employees' work by expecting them to produce the same for less.
Congress has burdened government employees with far more mandatory rules and regulations than businesses are subject to. In addition to mantory training, full documentation of all purchases with several levels of authorization for every penny so they can audit it later, and periodic investigations to make sure they interpret the rules properly, government employees must adhere to OSHA rules to the letter. They have to request approval for overtime and comp time, and working it without reporting it is a federal crime. They are required by law to take lunch (their timecards won't let them submit over seven hours without a lunch break), and if they work through lunch they are once again lying on their time cards and committing a federal crime.
You want to make it possible for government employees to save the government and the country money? Start with Congress.
Contracts, basically. You've probably never had a job before, but when/if you do, you'll find out that people always have some kind of contract. Once you have a permanent position or a fixed term position, the employer can't simply say "you don't have a job anymore, I'm not paying you past Monday". Any termination clause in the contract is going to specify some period of salary that still needs to be paid. For programs that are currently part-way though, even shutting them down requires money. Eg, putting equipment into storage or transfering it elsewhere, paying off orders that have already been put in. So sure yes there are always ways to cut money, but a very large fraction of costs simply cannot be cut, at least not overnight. NASA has had a tight budget for many years now - they do an awful lot with it, but they've been stretching it very thin and wide for a long time.
The entire sequestration issue is nothing but a political red herring. Of course NASA must shrink.
If you believe in Peak Oil this seems to be a logical partner:
http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/acknowledging-arrival-peak-government-part-1/75356
Looks like.
Transfer homeland defense budget to NASA problem solved.
The reason NASA's budget is cannot be cut is Congress. Any time NASA wants to shut down obsolete projects or consolidate projects Congress steps in to stop them. NASA early on spread itself into as many Congressional districts as possible to gain the most political pull, now it has come back to bite them in a major way.
some of them might actually get the funding ;)
--- Eat my sig.
Why not block grant NASA's budget to Elon and get it over with? Then the US Government can sell our portion of the ISS to the Chinese for $25B for Xprizes like low cost mobile fuel cells. Chinese are going to steal the tech anyways, they might as well foot the bill and pay for ISS upkeep and supplies.
It's sad to see an Inspector General get on a politicized soap box and yell "the sky is falling!" The Obama administration has gone out of its way to have every cabinet member and in fact everybody down the food chain or should I say "feeding trough" also echo a bunch of FUD over the sequestration. Just like our retarded Homeland Security Chief Napolitano, a bigger political idiot I'd be challenged to find on this planet! Wasn't it her program of "If you see something, say something?" Hey Janet, "you're a retard and a hypocrite because on one hand you tell us that because of sequestration the TSA will have to cut back and we'll have longer waits at the airport and yet you spend another $50M you didn't need toright after announcing that!" Sorry for ranting.
In the private sector, every manager usually has a few goals established that are boilerplate but still applicable.. One of them is "Reduce Costs by x%" usually x is 10. All of us in this economy has had to cut back and it's time for the US Government to stop spending every dollar they take in and a third more. $900B deficits are killing us now and will only get worse, it has to stop.
If you look at the data for NASA the current budget while it is less than they've spent under Continuing Resolutions but in FY2009 (The last year a budget was passed by Congress) Their budget was $17,782B. in 2010 and 2011 they were allowed to spend $18,724B and $18,448B respectively. That's pretty hefty in terms of spending increases and let's not forget they were still flying the Space Shuttles during those fiscal years! It was hella expensive to launch a shuttle and it has been a drain on NASA's budget for decades. By some estimates $192B over the life of the Shuttles.
Now the IG is whining that the budget is going to cause problems? I'd submit that after the Shuttle program ended that the budget should have gone down. But no, it's now down by their latest projection for FY2012 (the current budget year) $17,770B roughly the same as in FY2009!?!? Assuming 4 launches launches per year (FY2010) @ $1.5B/launch that's $6B just for not flying the Shuttle, but yet the budget didn't go down. Granted only two shuttles flew in FY2011, I'd still submit that's $3B that went to something "else."
What ever "else" is they need to just stop doing that because it came into fruition over the last year.
This is a very very poor set of arguments from an official who is supposed to be independent and the watchdog for the American People and he's not doing his job by echoing the same BS and FUD that the administration has pushed out since February. They have eliminated the Shuttle, reducing expenses of $6B/year and they want more money? What every they're smoking they need to share it with the rest of us!
This kind of attitude clearly points out why there's such a huge vacuum of leadership in DC. From Congress to the White House, it's time to vote them all out of office, but first fire this IG!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Well if NASA did not stop throwing billions down the manned spaceflight rathole, it would not be in such a mess. Nobody cares about ISS or SLS and few, if any, scientific discoveries has come from the manned missions. All the science (and excitement) is coming from robotic probes such as Curiousity. The SLS is the rocket to nowhere; its only purpose is to create jobs. Unfortunately NASA is run by ex-pilots, not scientists...
If we spend more and more money on entitlements, crony capitalism, global warming remediation, and bailing out home owners who can't afford their McMansions, there will be just less and less money left for interesting stuff like space exploration.
Having said that, NASA's budget in constant dollars is actually historically fairly high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Of course, given rampant fiscal irresponsbility, its percentage share of the total federal budget is declining, but that's hardly a decline in funding.
Yet, we have two rovers on Mars and two orbiters at Mars, an orbiter at Saturn, an orbiter at Mercury, a fly-by probe on the way to Pluto, multiple astronomical observatories, lunar orbiters, and more earth sciences orbiters than you can shake a stick at... In fact, NASA has more going on currently than at almost any other time in it's history. I'd suggest you calibrate your biases against reality, because the former is way out of touch with the latter.
I've been hearing that question since the mid-70's - NASA watchers seem to be mostly nothing but a bunch of Chicken Little's for whom the sky is perpetually falling.
From years of watching NASA, their problems aren't so much budgetary and managerial... and not just at HQ, but all the way out to the line troops at the Centers. NASA has a long standing problem with properly estimating and managing their budgets. To be fair, some of that isn't their fault - Congress is rarely inclined to fund the engineering development missions that would give them the experience to do so... as a result, practically every program and mission is a one-off that absolutely must succeed because failure isn't an option. And because Congress and the general public treat every failure as an earth shattering disaster, something of a positive feedback loop has been established which just makes the problem worse.
Obama killed the moon trip the mars trip and most of manned spaceflight altogether. NASA is a self admitted Muslim outreach program now. I mean for all his blather about education how much of that do you need to be part of Obama's infinite cadres of teacherscopsfirefighters?
Lots of Hope and Change coming now that NASA has been directed to "reach out to Muslims" plus also getting ready to start making plutonium again.
Once you have a permanent position or a fixed term position, the employer can't simply say "you don't have a job anymore, I'm not paying you past Monday".
I can tell you've never worked for a company before, because there's this little thing called "at will" employment.
Let me direct you to something more at your particular mental level.
I'll let you have the last word because I really don't care what a gradeschooler thinks about employment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley