> A House subcommittee once voted to cancel it. Instead, the program was rebooted with a strict spending cap. ... The major change, said Jonathan P. Gardner, the deputy senior project scientist, was to simplify the testing of the telescope.

Ugh, that does not sound encouraging. Organizations love to cut testing and QA. After all, all they do is cost money, cause delays, and 'create' problems. Cutting them is an obvious way to bring a project under budget and on schedule.

Does anyone know what changes were made to testing?

We're going to be unhappy, and the advancement of astronomy delayed a long time, if something goes wrong. I don't see the next President and Congress wanting to raise revenue and spend more on science.