It's official: NASA is a jobs program.
fourmilab.ch
fourmilab.ch
Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm FEMA claims they are under staffed.
There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.
So the Social Security Administration is lean. But, Nasa is a bloated cow.
EX: Saving money on toner cartigaes by changing the default faunt on a government document.
PS: I was part of the EISP program which reduces the cost to create ISP documentation by half. The contractors where not happy about this, but the government loved it.
The real problem, I suspect, isn't so much the waste caused by all those failproof projects. It's that, five or ten years down the line, the obvious solution to a real problem will have a side effect that diminishes the importance of some bureaucrat's carefully guarded little empire.
And I hope you are kidding with your toner cartridge example. I doubt if toner costs more than 0.1% of the total project costs, by reducing toner costs, you have achieved nothing. And if someone does get promoted because of this 'cost cutting' idea, it shows dilbert management and nothing else.
PS: It's true that people who have been around for a long time tend to be promoted, but those who innovate and network tend to get promoted faster.
I don't see that being any different than government.
> I don't see that being any different than government.
Oh really? What is the "windfall"? (It's not supposed to be money in govt.)
And, if it's the same, why is the typical govt service so bad?
My most horrifying experiences were with the private sector (1) to clear up identity theft that happened to me, (2) admitted inaccurate billing by a dentist.
What is your interaction with the IRS and SS? (I haven't run into any problems giving them money, but that's all that I've done with them so I don't have useful data.)
I receive USPS mail for a different address at least twice a week. I haven't been burned yet by my mail being misdelivered, but odds are that I won't stay a lucky unicorn forever.
This creates the insane situation where government agencies will often madly and recklessly try to spend any money they have left over when nearing the end of the financial year.
This is the one major difference I have seen between when I've worked in the private sector and when I've worked in government. In most areas of the private sector, you are rewarded for efficiency, in most areas of government, you are penalised for it.
Most of these represented far larger drops in government employment than the end of .Com.
Edit: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is another example which was closed down by Congress and the war boom in 1943 and provided almost 8 million jobs between 1935 and 1943. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration) After employing 8 million people.
Eliminated the spoils system, got rid of a bunch of time server type jobs.
On the other hand this manager has a lot to lose. First, most people find putting others out of a job unpleasant. Second, that manager and her co-workers will now have to absorb the duties of the fired employee. So more work for her. Third, the department would probably be exposed to litigation by the fired employee. In my experience government agencies don't fare very well in court, and the government is scrutinized much more closely for things like nepotism and racism than the private sector.
There is another issue at work here, which is that legislators have much stronger incentives to add parts to the government than to remove them. Sure, there are plenty of voters who favor making the government smaller in general, but for any particular program the number of people who care deeply about preserving that program is always greater than the number of people who care deeply about removing it. People simply don't have the time to study all parts of the government and advocate against the existence of unnecessary but small programs. The people who are served by those programs (or sell things to the government in support of them) have all the reason in the world to care. Actual reform of the system (instead of general pouting at the size of government) would require removing a large number of small programs, and this is unlikely to happen for the reason I just mentioned.
This strikes me as the most significant factor at work in the constant inflation of the government, and it's a really tricky problem.
While I totally agree with your point, I see a problem with this specific statement. The population as a whole is usually growing, so a government has to grow in order to support it (at least somewhat).
But, yes, efficiency is the problem.
I think right at the end of a major war would be a good place to look.
What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets.
As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do?
[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+dec...
Even if I were to accept your point that it's important to retain existing people for the knowledge they have, it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10%.
Now, I doubt that any commercial enterprise would use the exact same criterion as (if we take this one out-of-context slide at face value) NASA is using here. So what we have is some evidence that one thing NASA tries to do is to provide jobs. Which is not remotely the same thing as "NASA is a jobs program", which is the idiotic claim being made by the originally cited blog entry.
Perhaps not, but obviously many of them get over it. And if you think they don't like firing, they really don't like hiring.
Even if I were to believe that providing jobs is a worthy goal , there are cheaper ways for government to provide jobs than for NASA to create these jobs out of thin air.
And could you care to explain why you take offense about the 'out of context slide'? What's the missing context which will justify this slide's contents?
They try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. Their primary stakeholder is the American public; it is their job to benefit their stakeholders. Employment is a benefit, in the eyes of the great majority of people.
Secondly, this is hardly "out of thin air." Assessing the manpower needs of a project proposal and selecting for the ones that rank higher on the scale is very different than the government going "Break some rocks, collect a paycheck lol."
Let me get this straight. You want government to take money from people (by taxing them), creating organizations like NASA and give money to people (by providing jobs). My questions to you is, why go through all the trouble? Why not reduce taxes and let people keep their money thereby eliminating waste.
I didn't take offence about anything. I mentioned that the slide was taken out of context because, er, it was, and that might be relevant -- e.g., because there is a considerable difference between "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at whether it will provide jobs" and "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at a dozen things, one of which is whether it will provide jobs".
For instance: Suppose one of the other slides says that a criterion they use is some measure of efficiency: useful stuff achieved per unit money or time spent. Then what seems to me to be the only reason for objecting to "more jobs => better" largely goes away. (Let's have an even more specific, albeit rather artificial, example: suppose two of their metrics are "jobs provided" and "likely stuff achieved per job provided", and suppose the way they combine them is to multiply together. Then that is exactly equivalent to the single metric "likely stuff achieved", which I hope you would not object to.)
it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10% If you create a stable environment by not treating your workforce like rented mules you will not have significant turnover. The only way to bring in new capabilities is by increasing the head count.
The table shown in the article is tuned not only to weigh against losing people. It also -- and this is the really telling part -- is tuned to give preference to anything that increases the workforce.
Surely preserving the existing set of experts is not fostered by hiring on additional ones. That sounds to me like nothing more than empire-building. And I think that in the big picture, accounting for the possibility of future lean times, making NASA more dependent on personnel expenses must increase the possibility of having to let go some of the pile of experts that these preferences are amassing.
On the other hand, if the actual goal is not to increase the workforce size as such, why not just set up the criteria to reflect what your actual goal are?
That is, if your goal is to prevent "brain drain", why not specifically state the criteria in terms of loss of personnel possessing unique expertise. The criteria as stated would let us be perfectly willing to throw one Feynman under the train in order to save two cafeteria dishwashers.
One could argue they might have just made a bad powerpoint, but that sounds really weak.
If someone is designing a car, and one of his criteria is that using more steel is better, is that a good thing? If someone is writing a novel, and wants to raise the word count, is that useful?
With this framework in mind, what objective is the car designer trying to balance when deciding to use more steel? If the writer decides to use more words, what objective are the trying to meet? The first case you bring up is ridiculous and I'm not going to address any further. The second case is more fair. The novel writer does have to balance clarity of writing and the amount of pleasure they bring to the reader. Someone buying a 50 page book is going to feel pretty ripped off if they read it in 30 minutes. Why are the Harry Potter books so damn long? Because people love to read them. She could have just as easily written the same story in a lot shorter format if she had so decided.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
Could you name few inventions derived from NASA's knowledge which have helped us tremendously? Compare this to the research/inventions done by private corporations.
And as I pointed out in my other reply, why should Government take money from people, give it to NASA and NASA will return that money back to people by providing jobs? Why not reduce taxes so that we can eliminate waste by having NASA as the middleman?
Well, that's exactly the problem. The goal of any organization should be its mission. "Organize the world's information", "Dominate the operating system industry", or "Explore Space", etc. The problem with government organizations is that the employers can vote as a block. Thus over time the mission warps from "Exploring space" to "Provide jobs to NASA engineers"
I was just reading an economist piece on how the German people actually rate stake-holder interests above share-holder interests.
As for risk; show me the armies of those fired after the shuttle accidents. Even after Feynman exposed the dishonesty of the official reliability estimates, not a single bureaucrat lost his job for lying to Congress or the public about the risks (since the engineers had a good idea of the real risks, the management at NASA either knowingly lied or were effectively sticking their collective fingers in their ears and refusing to hear what the engineers said).
It takes thousands of people BECAUSE of all the advances in technology and automation and robotics and computers and so on.
I'm just a casual observer and fan, so I don't know if this is actually true, but the Mars rover mission seemed 10x more complicated than the Moon landings. And that's the last one... not the upcoming one that looks even more awesome.
NASA is a poorly run, oversized govt agency, but give them credit for accomplishing some of the most amazing feats humanity has ever seen in recent years. And you know what... maybe that's what it takes.
NASA has done some very impressive stuff it's true. But if you consider that it went from a standing start in 1958 to moon landing 11 years later, it ought to have done a lot more in the 40 years since then.
In the years since its Big Funding Crash, NASA has gotten good at robotic exploration, planetary science, launching satellites, and other interplanetary odd jobs that are impressive and important but less epic than the moon landing. They should keep doing what they're good at -- robotic exploration, space science, propulsion technology, etc.
But designing manned spacecraft that are safe and efficient at scale is something they've never really been set up to do. That job should be left to groups of people with the right incentives built into their organizational DNA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
Hopefully, they'll have more competition soon.
People act like that there is some sort of big populist movement to hate all big government. That's true, but you can be a big fan of NASA, the people who work there, and the stuff they do and still understand they need to shut the doors and turn the lights off. NASA is simply trying to be too much to too many people with too little money. Hell, manned spaceflight is lucky if they have the same mission for ten years in a row. The situation has just spun completely out of control.
Therefore if we can get to the point where the fuel is the only thing we need to use up, a 140 lb (70kg) person can get launched for just a few tens of thousand of dollars- hardly any more than the cost of an airflight; a little bit more than a supersonic airflight.
It's "odd" how NASA facilities are so often located in states that had politically powerful senators at the relevant time.
The "Robert Byrd" effect is not new. I'm waiting for them to rename West Virginia after him.
NASA also does a lot of aviation and other research besides just shooting people into space and playing golf on the moon.
The reason for launching in Florida is because if something goes wrong they can initiate the termination system and anything that falls out of the sky will be in the ocean, opposed to a populated area. Other NASA centers in other states are useful for shuttle returns. Often when bad weather is occurring they send the shuttle to land at NASA Dryden.
This split predates the shuttle by quite a while.
Was Huntsville a hot-bed of technical expertise before NASA or its predecessors?
For context, here's a brief history of NASA budgets: it's really quite good value in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
Now, I don't think NASA is beyond criticism...but to say they haven't innovated or done a lot with the resources available is just BS. NASA is the most successful space agency in the world, by a very long way.
If there is no demand for your work, you do not do what do you do for love but money and you do not enrich the society in the long term, you are a parasite.
Perhaps there are lots of people employed by other bits of the government who are parasites according to your criteria, but you've not exactly been specific about who. What exactly is your point?
2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?
not enough coffee this morning i guess.