NASA like all old orgs are extremely inefficient and overwhelmingly waste money. The solution is to create new orgs not hindered by old people that do the least work for the most pay.
The U.S. government just got red teamed by an extremely adversarial auditor in DOGE. They weren’t able to find almost any fraud (outside the DoD, which they didn’t touch). They found maybe tens of billions of spending they didn’t like out of a budget of trillions.
Also, we’re on a start-up board. Are you seriously arguing that every start-up, or even the median start-up, is less wasteful than the median century-old company?
To the extent there is documented inefficiency at NASA, it's in the way it manages its contractors for manned exploration. Its science budget is a paragon of institutional efficiency.
> It's not bottom up waste and fraud
Read the GAO report [1]. (Ctrl + F Bechtel.)
But for sake of argument, let's assume this is true. How does cutting the science budget while preserving SLS make sense?