NASA Has A Plan To Convert Its Field Centers Into FFRDCs
According to @NASA Technology Associate Administrator Jurczyk at the NAC meeting #NASA will deliver a report to @OMB tomorrow on proposals to convert some/all of NASA's field centers into FFRDCs. A meeting with #OMB on the plan is planned for 7 Sep. pic.twitter.com/KmzDA5ATJA
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 30, 2018
Keith’s note: FYI you may notice that emails from folks at JPL will soon have different addresses: jpl.nasa.gov will be changing to jpl.caltech.edu. Apparently NASA finally realized that people employed by JPL, a FFRDC, actually work for Caltech – not NASA.
If this actually goes anywhere beyond a proposal that will be progress. Such proposals have been made before, all squashed.
Not sure how lowering employee morale and efficiency of the top agency in the government per the Employee Viewpoint Survey is progress.
That isn’t obvious. JPL is a FFRDC, an I don’t think efficiency, moral or employee job satisfaction is any worse there than at the NASA centers. I haven’t heard of similar problems at the Department of Energy FFRDC labs, such as Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, etc.
When I worked at JPL I would say our morale was fine. The downside of being at an FFRDC, as far as I could tell, was that we were still saddled with an amazing array of onerous regulations originating with the federal government, that our counterparts at Caltech were not (I was at both). Caltech =/= JPL. While it is true that JPL employees are technically Caltech employees, all money at JPL flowed through the JPL prime contract, essentially being consolidated into a sort of super-budget. That even included individual science grants. As a result, that money was actually disbursed through a different mechanism than on-campus, and the entire center had it’s own governing apparatus separate from that of Caltech. We were also acutely aware that we were not civil servants, and that our employment absolutely hinged on the annual budget, and whether missions were or weren’t funded. I know other centers increasingly use contractors, so the civil service issue must be the same for them.
The way JPL works does have some annoying quirks. I’ve never worked there, but I’ve been a contractor on various projects for a quarter century. One interesting quirk is that their system assumes people work on one, and only one, project at a time. When I was working on both Cassini and Juno, the Cassini project manager was asked to approve things like foreign travel to a Juno project meeting. There record keeping system just had one field to track a person’s project manager and everything requiring approval from a project manager went to that one person. That’s quite a contrast from other research institutions, where it’s common for a person to be splitting their time between three or more projects.
That is most definitely not the case today at JPL, nor any time in the last 20 years. I would venture that a significant fraction of people have more than one project they work on. JPL (like many companies) is matrix – there is program/project management and line management. Your line manager would approve your travel – your travel request would specify which project you’re doing it for.
Mechanically, projects send “work authorization memos” (WAM) to line supervisors saying “employee A is authorized to charge project X from date Y to date Z”, typically with some sort of expectation of the level of effort (25% for instance). The supervisor “enables” that charge number to be used on the time card. A thing called a “work agreement” (WA) is also used between project and line to formalize expectations on level of effort, deliverables, etc.
There are people who have one charge number at a time – if you’re doing something as part of a team on a large project (MER, MSL, etc.) , it’s very plausible that you might only be doing one thing for a period of time. If you’re spending all your time at the Cape getting ready for launch, you probably have one charge number.
If you’re in an administrative or infrastructure support position (i.e. acquisitions, shipping, test equipment loan pool), you probably have one charge number.
But certainly, there is no problem splitting time and travel costs between projects, as long as it’s justified. In fact, if you can have multiple projects on the same trip that’s great – because you can split the transportation costs among the projects.
I agree, almost everyone I knew at JPL worked on multiple projects. I personally found it incredibly inefficient, but we did this a lot in order to create a full FTE’s worth of work in order to try and keep people employed. The idea that there would always be work and people would be shuffled around when their last project ended was something that was true years ago, but for at least the last decade or two, the funding profiles have been too small and too uncertain. We really struggled to find enough pots to dip into to try and maintain key core personnel. My personal observation (I was associated with CIT/JPL for just shy of 30 years) was that we had a core staff of “lifers” who would remain until retirement, but for the other 2/3 of the staff, typical tenures were about a decade (i.e. a project lifetime) before they moved on. I was going to say they got sick of it, but in many cases what they specifically got sick of was the employment uncertainty, and when their projects ramped down they threw in the towel and departed. Others were just not in the top half of the skill heap and “failed to be retained”, so no new offers were made.
The above explanation of how time is mechanically split is spot on. You have a line manager who approves your timesheets, even if multiple accounts are billed. They are typically the dominant reporting line, i.e. the manager for your largest timeslice.
As a contractor, I’ve only seen the system from the outside. But it’s definitely single-project from that perspective. I’ve just gotten an email about my status as an “Affiliate”, saying my “JPL Identity” will expire unless someone changes the (singular) project I’m affiliated with. It’s currently Cassini, and that’s closing out now that the mission is over. At the last Cassini PSG meeting, the project manager warned us that would happen and mentioned that, yes, he did get paperwork about our activities on other projects. About ten years ago, when I was working on both Juno and Cassini, I remember the then-project manager joking about this with me and a few other people in the same situation.
Internally, things might not be that formal or ingrained into the system. But from what I’ve seen people involved in major projects at JPL work on one project at a time. The exceptions I can think of are occasions when someone was transitioning from one project to another. In fact, I know someone who was told a particular project wouldn’t take him until he could commit 100% of his time. So I may have mistaken a pervasive but unofficial practice for policy. But, at least for major missions, 100% time on one project seems to be the way things are done. And, in terms of travel, it is very definitely the project manager, not the line manager, who decides who goes to which meetings.
By the way, I don’t really like the whole system of line and project management. At least for scientists and long-running projects, it can cause tangled lines of authority. For example, I’ve seen cases where a co-investigator got promoted into management and ended up being the principal investigator. I can only think of one occasion where that didn’t cause trouble. When that sort of thing involves multiple institutions, people often have to resign or recuse themselves (e.g. Stern over New Horizons when he was briefly the NASA AA for the Science Mission Directorate or Southwood as the Cassini magnetometer PI when he took a similar position with ESA.) But when it’s all within the same institution, that doesn’t seem to happen. (And, let me be clear, this comment is not about JPL alone. I’ve seen it in other institutions with the line/project management structure.)
Fcrary, I think there are two caveats here which account for the differences in your experience. First, you are an outside contractor. I know that this is definitely handled differently than regular employees (I would say how I know, but I am rapidly de-anonymizing myself). The other difference is that your experiences are within the planetary division, and I am coming from astrophysics. The two branches seem to have different cultural aspects for how missions are handled.
In talking to quite a few people that have left JPL and are now in successful positions elsewhere, each one complained about a culture with an extreme focus on having to have a code to charge to for each activity no matter how small. According to them this resulted in a continual fear for job security and limited innovation because they did not want to fail. We can debate what ventures are best for NASA, but when it comes to moving out and getting the work done, I am not convinced that private sector models, which tend to be more shortsighted in care for people and infrastructure, are the best approach for the long term efforts being done by NASA. Whatever the case, why mess around with a system and heritage that is so highly regarded by its own employees for the sake of implementing a political ideology? That makes me uncomfortable about this idea as well.
On the other hand, I’ve heard people at NASA centers complain about very similar things. I also know people at JPL who don’t complain about those things, although they do complain about other things. I think this tells us more about the employee satisfaction surveys themselves than actual employee satisfaction. In any case, why does being highly regarded by its employees make an organization productive or efficient?
But the remark about fear over job security seems odd. From what I’ve seen, many JPL managers consider it their responsibility to find projects for the people they manage. The individual employees do work to get assigned to a project they want to work on and not assigned to one they wouldn’t enjoy working on. In contrast, soft money researchers in academia are primarily responsible for bringing in their own funding. If the contracts and grants dry up, they may get some temporary funding. But compared to JPL, or industry, making sure there are projects to work on much more an individual rather than an institutional/management responsibility.
As a poor experience earlier this century at Los Alamos showed, a security-unaware and ineffective FFRDC management can have little or no effect in employee morale.
For NASA, the devil would be in the details: who would have fiduciary responsibility in project management? FFRDC employees or civil servants? I seem to remember Congress insisting on NASA opening a civil service-staffed project office at JHU APL to deal with issues of this sort.
“I seem to remember Congress insisting on NASA opening a civil service-staffed project office at JHU APL”
That was my recollection for JPL as well…
It could be either or both, but the role and staffing are pretty minimal. The actual project managers are APL and JPL employees. My understanding is that any NASA civil servants are acting to monitor the management process and make sure things are done according to NASA policies.
That’s actually an advantage in some ways. In Discovery and New Frontiers AOs, it specifically says they assume management will be done by a NASA center or JPL, and that if that isn’t the case, the proposal needs to show that things will be managed the way NASA expects. If having a couple civil servants on campus gives you a free pass for that requirement (as it seems to for JPL), then that’s not too bad.
I don’t think that the AOs include JPL because of a few civil servants who are mostly unseen, but because JPL was historically given a large number of large directed planetary missions and as a result has a great deal of expertise and infrastructure for managing them. I’ve seen AOs that specified “JPL or Goddard” and excluded the other centers from management. The civil servants are very few in number and mostly deal with things at the contractual level – it’s not like Goddard where you might see a few civil servants managing the work of a bunch of on-site contractors. They’re invisible to most JPLers.
As far as people at JPL being single-project, it can vary a lot with what you do and where you are on lab. In more than 20 years I’ve never been only on a single project, typically working at least one large-ish thing and then doing a bunch of smaller projects or science or technology development. If you’re a mechanical designer or thermal engineer you might get assigned to a single project for an extended period and function as a subcontractor for people responsible for various pieces of that project. Many technicians will work on multiple projects due to the phasing of hands-on work. There are admin types who work both ways – some who charge direct to many different projects that they help smooth things out for, and others who have a single number so that individual “customers” can’t unduly influence them.
My experience is more consistent with what both jimlux and cb450sc have described – yours is very likely biased by your primary involvement being Cassini, which was probably the last time most of the lab was focused on just one or two major missions. I arrived at JPL shortly before Cassini launched. Since then the number of missions and instruments in development at any given time has gone up rapidly so that most people apply their specialist expertise to multiple projects. The lab has also put a great deal of effort into tools to make getting much of the repetitive stuff done more easily. Many of the tools started out clunky and unpopular, but many have turned out to be very good, which is part of how more projects can get done with about the same number of people.
For a skilled and well motivated workforce it wouldn’t matter much whether civil service or FFRDC for most positions. The problem with NASA is they let the civil servants do nothing if they want. Sometimes management and the projects are happy to pay certain civil servants to stay out of the way. The FFRDC don’t tolerate this anywhere near as much. I think that’s actually what’s the motive for either closing centers or going to the politically better sounding FFRDC.
DOE Northwest is a FFRDC to right?
This question was asked yesterday at the JSC all hands and geyer gave it an almost zero chance of happening at JSC.
I have zero idea what this actually means. Sure, I can Google what an FFRDC is but what does it change for NASA and/or NASA employees/contractors? Is there an “FFRDCs for Dummies”?
It means the center(s) would be managed by someone with a NASA contract to do so. That contracting organization would be competitively selected, and the contracts would be recompeted every five or ten years. Although it is unusual for the previous contractor to be replaced in the recompetition. The employees would work for the managing organization, rather than being civil servants or people directly contracted by NASA. What that means in terms of cost and efficiency is open to debate. I guess the short version is that it means outsourcing the center(s) management and operations
Let me take a wild guess: NASA Centers in the deep south will remain NASA facilities.
That’s quite possible, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. I suspect the difficulties of transforming a center to a FFRDC would depend on the nature of the center. Major hardware and infrastructure (say, a launch complex or the Vehicle Assemble Building at Kennedy) would raise very different issues from shifting personnel from being civil servants to being employees of the managing contractor.
I think those NASA centers in the deep south have more of the big hardware and infrastructure than other centers like Goddard or Ames. I’d expect them to be treated differently.
However LC39A is now managed under lease by SpaceX, and quite efficiently, if you ask me. But it is not NASA asking for proposals for someone to manage the facility. That would make it impossible for SpaceX to make money, except by overcharging the government. Instead it is NASA making the facility available for lease to whoever can use if productively.
At KSC contracts almost always have limited terms and require bidding companies to have fewer employees than are actually needed to do the work, or award the contract to the partnership with the largest number of small businesses. Consequently it is generally impossible for the incumbert to even bid, let alone win. An FFRCD could not function with such turmoil, and no one has suggested that the JPL contract should be offered every five years to the low bidder, or that anything would b e gained by doing so, so why is this the case with support contracts?
Needless to say, there is no evidence that awarding a contract to the low bidder while also requiring shell companies to be created for each contract rebid improves efficiecy; the cost of the rebid process itself, when all the elements are added together, is a significant percentage of the total contract,
“LC39A is now managed under lease by SpaceX, and quite efficiently, if you ask me.” True, but LC39A is being managed by SpaceX for SpaceX.
That’s a lot different than if they were managing it for NASA with NASA oversight. In that situation, I’d fully expect NASA people with the modern equivalent of clipboards walking around behind every SpaceX worker to sign off that every work item had been done correctly. That could end up being hideously inefficient, especially when you consider that every plan for every work item would have to also have been signed off in advance. The meetings to approve the work items could involve more person-hours than the actual work itself.
Did I mention I hate meetings? I always feel like I should be doing “real work” instead.
In both of the Musk biographies that I read, the writers report that folks in meetings with Musk or anyone else have blanket permission to just get up and leave when they think best.
I’ve been working as a consultant for HOAs for so many years that I’m accustomed to everything being repeated accustomed to everything being repeated.
My observation also, except to note that the “modern equivalent of clipboards” are ,,,, clipboards.
“Although it is unusual for the previous contractor to be replaced in the recompetition.”
I could be wrong, but I know of few if any cases at KSC where an incumbent actually held on to a contract. At KSC evey support contract is rebid every few years on the theory that the “competition” will get a “better deal” for the government. Of course the requirements for small business leadership or paricipation means that incumbents in small business setasides can seldom even qualify because the employee limit for bidding is often less than the number of people needed to do the work. Larger contracts turn into conglamorates of a dozen small businesses, some with only a handful of employees. And the process of writing an RFP costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, often tying up critical government employees for a year or more, while the contractor has to spend a million or more on the proposal. ALL of this money is sucked out of the limited taxpayer dollars we have to actually explore space.
In contrast, JPL has been run lock stock and barrel by one contractor for as long as anyone can remember, and there’s no evidence at all that this is less efficient. So would a FFRDC be like JPL, or would there be dozens of subcontractors with the entire contract changing management every three years?
I could see this happening at most centers except JSC, KSC, and Langley
I can see it starting with the research centers first- Jurcyzk when he was at Langley was even proposing it to Mike Griffen.
It’s a great way to ditch ownership and responsibility for the research centers since the NASA programs resent any of their funding going to the research centers.
In June, NASA extended CalTech’s contract to manage JPL for five years and $15 billion. I don’t think that includes the contracts for flight projects and research grants to scientists there. At $3 billion per year, I don’t see a resentment over money going to research centers.
By the way, how much does Langley use its wind tunnels these days? I think the presence or absence of major hardware like that would be an issue for converting a center into a FFRDC.
A few years back Lightfoot visited Langley showing the new vision plans. One astute new hire asked where Langley was in the plans because it wasn’t clear. Lightfoot went on to explain how the programs don’t want to fund lower level research and the research centers. What was weird was lightfoot offered no discussion when asked by a branch manager about how Langley could become more relevant to the programs. Several new hires stood up and expressed their frustration stating that they turned down some nice job offers to come to NASA – and were told they needed their expertise.
Basically the NASA centers don’t play well together and each center would rather hire contractors. During the period that there were plans to shut down Langley i job hunted – and was surprised that most of the job interviews were for NASA efforts. Basically several wanted to hire me but didn’t want to work with Langley if I remained a civil servant. Griffen remedied that by a policy that civil servants had dibs over contractors. So it helped until he left.
Lightfoot and Langley politics and poor management was one of the main reasons I retired early and decided to go into some very interesting commercial research and development efforts. Langley was in the process of closing down several wind tunnels. Any and all facilities at Langley could be turned over to the FFRDC or other organizations by several mechanisms. Nasa centers already do this.
“Basically the NASA centers don’t play well together” is an understatement. It’s been this way as long as I can remember. And I’m an outsider looking in (aerospace engineering degree, but my career has been writing code for finite element software for a very large company).
I’ve see two types of civil servants at NASA, the true believers who come in on their weekends and are really motivated and the dead weight that sleep at their desks and are the last to come in and first to leave. It’s a serious problem and a financial suck. I’ve see folks roll in at around 10am and out a 3pm and sometime never
show up for work for a couple weeks with their branch chief completely
unaware. Make it easier to reorient, layoff, fire, and provide more merit-based pay and bonuses for civil servants and you don’t need to a to a contractor-based organization.
That’s not unique to civil servants. I’ve said on several occasions that JPL is staffed by a mix of really excellent, dedicated people, people who are good at their jobs but not spectacular, and people who are basically a waste of oxygen. And I’ve noticed the same thing in industry and at universities. Getting rid of civil servants isn’t a miracle cure for this.
It’s surfing a wave that continues to deprecate folks who work for a living, a wave chiefly informed by disdain for any type of actual labor- and the folks who do it.
(And, yes, I’m counting scientists as ‘labor’, at least in this restricted context).
While true, in the private sector, occasional layoffs (when done correctly) tend to get rid of the dead wood. Of course one of the side effects of these occasional layoffs is that you can create a culture where no one feels safe in their job. In that sort of a culture, you can actually lose people after the layoff that you absolutely didn’t want to lose because they don’t feel safe working for your company. I’ve seen this one first hand more times than I’d like to have seen.
Interesting regarding the email address… it was an oddity that JPL kept the center specific email after the move to One NASA. I wonder if JPL folks will now also have a One NASA email (e.g., [email protected]). as contractors at other centers have.
“In order to bolster NASA’s agility, increased use of FFRDCs could provide greater flexibility than civil servant organizations, potentially allowing them to better meet the agency’s evolving needs.”
Private organizations can hire and fire/rif employees a who lot cheaper and efficiently than the civil service. It makes sense to convert the research centers to FFRDC if NASA programs continued reluctance to fund the research centers. Recall not too long ago there were plans to even close the several research centers
Here’s the roots to the 2004 FFRDC Report linked below with a pertinent quote. Basically NASA wasted to shut down centers- especially research centers. Nasa Langley management was proposing and giddy about shutting down the center. One plan was for Langley management to be like darpa and manages contracts while getting rid of the researchers. Director Bridges even gave a speech about encouraging us to find jobs and leave if we could find jobs. Langley even brought in organizations to do job fairs to help. Then Director Bridges claimed he was shocked by the brain drain because the job fairs wanted to hire so many and were hiring the best ones.
Then later FFRDC became the new fad idea about what to do with the researchers. They preferred shutting it all down rather than a rif so they could start the hiring process from scratch into the National Institute Of Aerospace organization they set up.
“Aldridge acknowledged there was a more practical reason for that recommendation. “Our view of it was, if we put into our report that the Congress and NASA should undertake a base realignment and closure action, the report would have probably been burned on the first day,” he said, citing long-standing opposition to any effort to close one or more field centers. “That was too hard to do.”
https://spacenews.com/nasa-…
When you mentioned the National Institute of Aerospace, you made me realize I was missing something obvious. I’d been wondering who would bid for the FFRDC contracts, if the centers were converted. Being local isn’t required, but it certainly makes for a stronger big. Forgetting about NIA, I couldn’t think of anyone local to Langley, other than Hampton University which isn’t close to big enough to run a FFRDC. (No offense intended; it’s just a small university and running a FFRDC takes a large amount of administrative infrastructure.)
No offense taken. The lack of a high tier university in our area is a big problem. Even NIA really isn’t working out all that well. It’s cheaper and less politics to deal with each university separately than through NIA. I ended up primarily working with small innovative commercial companies and top universities throughout the U.S.
Senator Lieberman initiated a lab demo effort within the dod. USAF research lab in Albuquerque was selected and the other dod agencies pick a lab to be in the demo. Basically each lab was given wide latitude – could become whatever entity it wanted – commercial, FFRDC, university,…
AFRL explored becoming FFRDC as the best option – and wanted to be run by an large aerospace company. Basically they Terms of the FFRDC was to fire all gov employees, clear out all junk in the labs except for some listed good stuff, tear down the old dilapidated buildings. The purpose of the lab demo was to figure out what to do with the civil servants to get them to be productive. So this FFRDC offer was rejected. Nothing ever came out of our lab demo effort- and I doubt the navy and army fared any better since nothing ever happened.
I suspect there might not be many FFRDC takers for the NASA labs along the lines of what happened with the Albuquerque afrl labs.
This concept of privatizing govt agencies, I wonder who is pushing it and who will benefit? Some say companies work better than agencies, I ask “how’s that customer service coming along?”
From a simple estimate, it seems like the Field Centers get a raw deal budget wise and have to put up with more bureaucratic constraints with substantially less money:
JPL’s contract renewal for the next 5 years is worth $15 billion dollars, so $3 billion/year from the NASA budget.
$3 billion dollars represents about 1/6 of the total NASA annual budget, which is about $18 billion dollars.
From even this very simple estimate, it’s clear that JPL + the 10 field centers can’t have the same budget or even close to it if JPL eats up 1/6 of the total annual budget.
The 10 NASA Centers, both civl servants/contractors, operate with ~ $18-3 billion per year = $15 billion, with an annual budget of approx $1.5 billion per center. So, each field center, in this very simplistic estimation, gets half of what JPL gets per year…
I know that this is very rough, though perhaps someone can expand the conversation by citing what the annual operating budgets are for the field centers in comparison? If that info is out there, is it that far off from this estimate…seems like an annual budget is an annual budget, making this a zero sum game..
Sources:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ne…
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ne…
Your math is pretty far off. JPLs annual budget has been under 2B for 8 of the last 10 years. And the NASA budget is 20B.
Not that each center should have the same budget, they have very different project bases. Your math seems willfully incorrect.
According to the JPL press release he referenced (dated June 29, 2018) CalTech’s contract to operate JPL has been renewed for five years and $15 billion. $15 billion/5 years is $3 billion per year. Although I sometimes complain about details getting watered down in JPL press releases, I assume they can get that much right.
It isn’t at all clear what that includes. There are some things it probably doesn’t cover, such as work on competed grants and missions. What if a JPL proposal is selected for the next Discovery mission? That would be $495 million and I can’t see how it could be included in a contract signed a year before the proposals are even due.
If you look at how things have worked in the past, the press release is probably oversimplifying and the $15B is an approximate upper value, with a good deal of it undefined as to what it’s for. JPL gets some of its work through big directed missions (Cassini, Curiosity, Mars 2020, etc) and some of the work through competed missions/instruments/technology development. If a JPL mission gets selected for the next Discovery it gets added to the JPL contract, but it’s probably not on top of the $3B, but baked in as being consistent with the typical amount of work that the lab wins. If JPL loses everything it competes for in those 5 years then the budget is probably quite a bit lower.
All- Please note that I provided sources specifically because I had a hunch that there may be some unique perspectives, such as the one above that called my math “willfully incorrect.”
If you can identify what is willful here (as if to say that I selectively cherry picked sources), I am all ears.
If you can also identify what is incorrect with the sources provided, I am equally all ears.
Here are the sources again, to make fact checking easy:
Sources (click on links for sources to appear–the links are incomplete as posted on NASAWatch-at least from my laptop). Happy Hunting!
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ne…
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ne…
I tried looking at the FY19 budget requests, but the funding by center isn’t clearly called out. There is a $1.9 billion line item for center management and operations, but that can’t be everything (the JPL press release says CalTech is getting $15 billion over the next five years…) Presumably that $3 billion per year includes things in other line items. As I understand it, operating the Deep Space Network is included in JPL’s budget, but that’s a different item in the NASA budget.
That makes it hard to work out the budgets for the other centers. They didn’t hand us a press release, and even if they had, I’m not sure there would be center-to-center consistency on what was included. Are, for example, modifications to LC 39-B included in the Kennedy Space Center operating budget (as center facilities) or in the SLS budget, since SLS is the program requiring the modifications?
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