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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.'"
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?
Try again. Sequestration hit 5 months into the year. Assuming a relatively constant spending of money, $894 million is 8.6% of $10.4 billion[which is 7/12 of 17.8 billion]. This makes senses as it is the commonly quoted percentage for every agency facing cuts. But all of that budget isn't really cuttable. Say half of the budget is uncuttable. That leaves you needing to suddenly cut 20% out of the budget that is cuttable. This is where you get 1 day a week furloughs and whole programs/services eliminated like we've been hearing about in other agencies.
In fact, the march of inflation means that if you don't automatically get a raise/budget increase, then yes your budget is shrinking in real terms. So the only part of your post that refrains from whining like a Randroid version of Chris Crocker for long enough to make a vaguely factual claim is... factually wrong.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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 !!
ISTM that since about 1980 we've been running the USA as a cream-skimming operation for the rich. Once they have everything they'll move on to another country full of stupid voters and leave what's left of the USA to fend for itself. Probably burdened with huge IMF debts, which, unlike the current debt that everyone is fainting over, actually have to be paid back.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Meanwhile at the DOD: Pallets of shrinkwrapped Benjamins equal to 13 years of savings from NASA budget cuts simply vanished and no one can explain where they went.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
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.
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
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.
Inflation is not negligible, it's been held to a few percent a year. In the aftermath of the CDO scam's collapse, the abrupt destruction of vast amounts of imaginary "wealth" did threaten deflation by reducing the available money supply (which is exactly what happened in 1929) - this is as good as the mark of death for an economy, hence the Fed's extraordinary moves to prevent it from happening.
If NASA were receiving this mythical "automatic 5-10% annual budget increase" you speak of since 1990, their present budget would be somewhere between 25 and 80 billion dollars a year. In reality, NASA's inflation indexed budget has been essentially flat since then and they have declined to representing one percent to less than half a percent of the federal budget over the same timespan.
Meanwhile, America's one-of-a-kind privatized healthcare system that already costs more per capita than any other on earth by a factor of several continues to inflate costs at double-digit rates. The concentration of wealth in the 1% of the 1% has reached levels not seen since the start of the Great Depression. The GOP has clearly indicated that they will sooner burn our government to the ground than entertain the suggestion that top-tier tax rates be raised from the lowest levels in living memory, or that investment income be taxed at more than half the rate of personal income, at the same time they scream at the top of their lungs that the deficit can only be fixed by doing things that overwhelmingly hurt the poor and middle class.
Of all the problems we're facing, the fact that our government spends a whopping few percent of its budget on actual science (nasa, nsf, doe combined) is not one of them. In fact, given the almost inconcievably huge returns on investment that investments in science historically bring, it's quite insane that we're not spending more on it. I think of a trillion dollars of wealth poured into a black hole in Iraq, never to return, and imagine what if, instead of the wealth-destruction described to the letter in 1984, that trillion dollars had been spent on research into fusion reactors, fuel cells, batteries, solar technologies, computing...
some of them might actually get the funding ;)
--- Eat my sig.
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"
Unless you are a complete idiot, every American already took a 3% cut in income Jan 1 due to FICA going back up. So, when we all took an income hit we were told "suck it up" - when the government takes a hit in additional spending (remember they are only cutting the rate of growth, not actual spending cuts) - Obama and Congress run around like the world is ending.
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.
If you can cut X% of your budget easily, it means you were running inefficiently in the first place. Any idiot who proclaims they experience no losses from cutting say, 20% of their budget, as has been out there since the sequestration hit, should be fired because it means they were straight up wasting 20% of their budget since it was apparently unnecessary.
You mentioned the Republicans but forgot to mention the Democrats would rather burn the republic to the ground than make mile reductions in their massive increases (which started under Bush btw).
Your one-sided rhetoric shows you are part of the problem, not the solution. It is the Democrats you praise who are playing the same game schoolboards play, but at a national level, where they cut school bus service first, to irritate parents. Here, they do asinine things like not deploy an ostensibly needed aircraft carrier, or force factories to shut down...for lack of inspectors, both of which should have been among the very last, not first things. I can't say Romney would be much better, but Obama is about as foolish a president I've seen, deliberately abrogating leadership and choosing to play rhetorical games of chicken -- "Our car is crashing," he says, "and it's the Republicans in the back seat, not me behind the wheel."
In the bigger picture, you are just the substrate for your political meme spread mechanism, where you aid in power seizure to force the meme onto others.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
-- The problem, generally speaking, is that government is inefficient. A dollar spent on government goods and services is, more likely than not, better left in your pocket to spend on the private sector's goods and services. That's as true of NASA as it is of the DOD. We've already spent hundreds of billions of dollars, both directly and indirectly, on things like solar technologies, fusion, etc., that have gone nowhere. It would have been better if that money had been left in our pockets to buy the goods and services that we want; at least then we'd have something for it. Yes, government occasionally invents something from time to time that proves useful; the same is true for the private sector, but the private sector does it for less.
To throw out a NASA example, the International Space Station (ISS) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion (including contributions from many other countries), a third of which was the cost of Space Shuttle flights (36 flights at $1.4 billion each, according to Wikipedia. This includes the fixed costs of keeping the Shuttle program running past the year 2000 since the Shuttle was used almost exclusively for the ISS.).
What did we get as a result? I think the three main benefits were a demonstration of orbital assembly, a platform for testing space technologies, and a modest amount of space R&D. Apparently, on the last point, the ISS is remarkably weak.
It has a crew of six for about 10-11 months of the year (with a skeleton crew of three in between) and when it does, only one person can be spared to do such research. I don't know what the rest of the crew is doing, but it's apparently not research. There is some talk of expanding the crew on the ISS, but that apparently is limited by the need to have a "lifeboat" for everyone on board.
The US could have saved almost all of the Shuttle money, if they had simply decommissioned the Shuttle in 2000 and launched the ISS components on a Delta IV Heavy or Proton. They could have saved a lot more than that including many years of time, if they had decommissioned the Shuttle in 1990 and launched and assembled a Mir sized station (130 tons instead of 450 tons, and 3 crew members instead of 6) station in 1990 using the Titan IV rocket (that rocket was enormously expensive per launch, but only because it was used less frequently than once a year) with some attention paid to lowering the maintenance load of the station.
A low maintenance Mir-class station launched on a cheaper rocket (and operating at least a decade earlier) would have demonstrated just about everything the ISS does for a small fraction of the cost (I'd say one to two orders of magnitude). But that wouldn't have been a big enough pyramid for the politicians writing the checks.