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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.'"
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.
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...