OGC Sees Changes Ahead at NASA
NASA is changing the way it does business, new GC says, Washington Post
“NASA is changing the way it is doing business, spending less on traditional contracts and partnering more with the private sector and local governments to further the growth of the commercial space industry. That transition promises to be a prime preoccupation for the agency’s new top lawyer, Sumara Thompson-King. Thompson-King became NASA’s general counsel on June 1, replacing Michael Wholley, who held the post since 2004. She is the first woman and the first African American to lead the agency’s legal department, which has about 175 attorneys.”
Might be an interesting challenge since Congress seems to want to maintain the status quo.
Exactly. But once again it shows that there are at least some people at NASA who want to modernize things.
There are some amazingly perverse incentives at play in Congress. For instance, in political terms, they find it more profitable to have programs quietly fail (via their own budgetary sabotage) after spending billions than to have them succeed spectacularly and create too much scrutiny.
Well that’s a very oddly written article! After starting off with the writer saying “That transition promises to be a prime preoccupation” the article veers off and never says why the preoccupation. It’s as if the writer didn’t pickup on the difference between types of contracts at all, then totally forgot to backtrack to the legal angles and issues?
The worst indictment of the current default system of cost-plus, FAR-based contracting I can think of is that NASA has 175 freakin’ lawyers on its payroll!
For the number of employees and number of managed contracts with public funds, 175 is a surprisingly small number. If you account for HR lawyers, IP lawyers, finances people, international sensitivities, nationally critical technology assets etc that’s actually a very positively small number.
Go into any corporation with similar numbers of employees and you’ll find a ton more lawyers.
No, you won’t.
First, the number of employees is barely correlated with how many lawyers it takes to conduct company legal affairs. A manufacturing company with 1,000 employees is not going to generate nearly as much legal work as would, say, a hedge fund with 50 employees.
Second, businesses have been ruthlessly pruning legal departments and pressing their outside counsel firms as well. That’s one of the reasons legal employment and law school enrollment have both cratered in recent years. Government service is one of the few places where an otherwise supernumerary lawyer can still find some hope of employment.