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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
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 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...
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"
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.