How OMB Prioritizes What NASA Wants
Commentary: Beyond the decadal surveys: Establishing policy for US space science, Physics Today
“A surprisingly small number of individuals at the OMB are involved in space science: the director of the OMB and the associate director for natural resource programs, both of whom are political appointees; the deputy associate director for the energy, science, and water division; and the fewer than 10 individuals who make up the division’s science and space branch. Space science is, for the most part, handled by just a few career civil servants. I’ve not come across anyone in Congress or the executive branch who simply did not want to fund space-science missions. I have, however, encountered government officials who are vividly frustrated with cost overruns, and I have found that bureaucrats tend to value flexibility. The folks I met at the OMB and on Capitol Hill were sensitive to unforeseen occurrences or prescriptive options that placed undue limits on future actions, particularly if they interfered with agreed-on courses of action or involved a time frame beyond which policies–or politicians–might experience turnover.”
The space community certainly contributes to cost overruns. And in some cases, mis-management is rightly at fault.
But the situation is much more serious.
Many space-related projects are open-ended, and for a good reason.
Much of what is called cost overruns are really experimental results, or the end product of a research project, or developing new technologies. Pity the governmental assessor with neither the tools nor the background to properly understand what’s going on. No wonder poor decisions ensue.
Oh. The pejorative use of ‘bureaucrat’ just makes me crazy:
This is bad!
“bureaucrats tend to value flexibility:”
This is better:
“When equipped with appropriate tools or training, professional assessors make decisions that benefit the project and the Treasury.”
I guess it’s subjective, but I didn’t see that use of “bureaucrat” as pejorative. In any case, I also don’t think your paraphrase captured the idea. The people at OMB are in a position where they have to do there best to satisfy conflicting demands and requirements. They like to have options, and don’t like it when a someone sets things up so they have one and only one choice.
The way the last planetary science decadal survey handled a Mars sample return was an example of that. They split it up into three missions, all clearly multi-billion dollar missions, to respectively collect and cache samples, collect and launch the samples to orbit, and transport the samples from Mars orbit to Earth (or Earth orbit.) Only the first one was really within their charter, since the second and third wouldn’t be in the 2013-2023 period the survey was supposed to cover. But it was the highest priority for flagship missions. Think about the position that puts NASA, OMB and the planetary science community in. Once the first mission is funded and approved (which is was, in the form of Mars 2020), it’s virtually impossible _not_ to fund the second and third. By structuring it the way they did, the decadal survey basically locks everyone into a multi-decade commitment costing upward of $5 billion. When the article said, “bureaucrats tend to value flexibility,” I took it to be a polite way of saying the folks at OMB hate it when people make their lives hard by playing tricks like that.
I take your point, particularly that I failed to catch the spirit of meaning in my paraphrase.
The fact that the word is hard to spell is particularly irritating…
The OMB analysts point out to their bosses that these are long-term commitments. They are not surprised, but fully aware. That being said, they are inherently predisposed to budgetary program plans that aggregate various projects into an overall spending level that tends to be the same year after year. Queuing up projects to fit into that commitment is thus NASA’s responsibility. In the Mars’ program, that can be done by postponing the start of a follow-on project by several years.
Sure. But the analysts’ bosses are more senior bureaucrat. Or, if and when something can’t get resolved at a lower level, the decisions get bumped up and the bureaucrats can, should, or would like to, make recommendations or list off the options. That means they’d really prefer to have more than one option to list. And, as far as NASA’s responsibilities go, I don’t think any government agency has ever meekly stuck to a flat budget rather than arguing for (or explaining why they need) more. OMB is the agency that gets to say no, when there isn’t enough money for everything an agency wants, or even when there isn’t enough money for everything the administration and congress have asked them to do.
In the case of the Mars program, there’s also the fun job of doing what the National Academies reports have said they should do. Which in one place says a sample return is the highest priority, and in another place (the midterm report on how well NASA is following the decadal survey) said NASA is risking the whole idea of a Mars “program” by focusing on rare, very expensive missions.