Comment by stonogo
2 days ago
NASA does not directly operate JWST anyway (AURA does that via STScI), but the idea that NASA is bloated and Northrop/Ball/L3Harris are not is hilarious. If you know of people getting paid to 'sit on their hands' at NASA, you should report that to the OIG: https://oigforms.nasa.gov/wp_cyberhotline.html
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
JWST is part of NASA, they surely hire out contractors but those contractors would still report to NASA and probably work in a NASA building. I'm not sure what your point is.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
My point is that slashing the budget will not result in meaningful management changes, just a reduction in services.
"Reporting to NASA" and "being part of NASA" are two different situations. AURA, which runs STScI and thereby JWST, reports to more than just NASA. It's an international project, so the consortium of universities that comprise AURA reports to multiple agencies. The fact that you think this is fundamentally identical to internal NASA culture tells me you're not qualified to ascertain the level of my political information.
STScI is not working in a NASA building, they're operating out of Johns Hopkins. I've consulted for this organization a half dozen times, and I've consulted for NASA Goddard as well, and I am telling you they are not the same.
What I meant by the sound bite reference is that there is not any meaningful insight being brought to the work DOGE is doing. They're doing keyword searches and sorting by total contract spend and binning anything whose title would make a good Twitter post. We saw all this before from Ross Perot.