White House Petition on NASA EPO
Repeal the sequester’s cuts on NASA’s spending in public outreach and its STEM programs
“Repeal the sequester’s cuts on NASA’s spending in public outreach and its STEM programs The Sequester’s recent cuts on NASA’s spending in public outreach and its STEM programs must not be allowed. These cuts would end the many programs NASA has for educating the children of our society, as well as many other forms of public outreach held by NASA. In an internal memo issued on the evening of Friday, March 22, the Administration notes that “effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review. In terms of scope, this includes all public engagement and outreach events, programs, activities, and products developed and implemented by Headquarters, Mission Directorates, and Centers across the Agency, including all education and public outreach efforts conducted by programs and projects.”
NASA Suspends All Education and Public Outreach (Update), Earlier post
The White House can’t repeal sequester. Laws are passed and changed by Congress. If you really want to make a difference, contact your senators and congressmen. Especially if you don’t live in a state near a NASA center, let them know you value NASA’s education and outreach efforts.
The point isn’t to repeal sequester; it is to drop this stupid draconian way to save money.
Amen, planetfan. A very simple freshman-level analysis of the US budget deficit over time shows the very simple obvious answer. The deficit is reduced by job growth. That’s when people move from being consumers of government services to being funders of same. It’s always been true and it’s true today. All the rest is political rubbish.
The entire human spaceflight program is a consumer of government services, so by your principles it should be cancelled.
Uh, so is pretty much every bit of government besides the IRS…? The “entire human spaceflight program” and any government institution are also not “people”. You were trying a little too hard to be contrarian.
There is plenty of Money……..if JPL would just stop paying engineers $265,000/yr, contributing 8-9% towards their 403B (excluding employee contributions), paying the college tuition for engineers children, giving them every other Friday off, expecting engineers to contribution towards their unbelievable medical benefits.
The problem with govt funding of everything is that it encourages the lowest level of performance. GOT A BUDGET, SPEND THE BUDGET OR LOSE IT NEXT YEAR.
Raises are not based on performance. Everyone gets one for doing a job they can’t possibly be fired from….THEY HAVE TO SPEND THE BUDGET OR LOSE IT NEXT YEAR.
Yes, of course! The answer must be to pay the very best engineers less than they are worth. They’ll surely be happy to keep building spacecraft for us if we stiff them. Proper health care? Who do they think they are! A livable retirement income? What, haven’t they heard of greeter jobs as Walmart? SpaceWaste has it right on the head – America will never be great again until we impoverish everyone and ensure that they and their descendants die young and hungry. That’s the American dream!
Proper health care should, in my opinion, be universal rather than tied to a job. This would not impoverish everyone since high quality universal systems have lower per-capita costs than our private insurance system.
I live in Ontario, Canada, where we have a health care program that is paid for by both income taxes and business taxes and administered by the provincial government. Not only is it more affordable than other systems, the quality of our health care is as good as it gets. It has saved my life more than once; if I’d had to pay out of pocket or rely on a company plan, I simply wouldn’t be here today. To make vultures4’s point — at one point I had life-saving surgery while I was unemployed and it didn’t cost me a cent (aside from $15 for the phone in my room), except for what I paid through taxes, the same as everybody else. I don’t know if there’s an upper limit on the number of people that can be covered under a system like ours, but I would think it would be quite doable at the state level (Ontario has about 13 milion people).
The “use it or lose it” problem is real and could be solved by legislation to allow budget authority to be carried over for a couple of years. In some cases this is actually allowed, it seems to depend on the funding source. The salaries JPL pays are worth it if they can deliver quality spacecraft on budget, which seems rare for NASA as a whole.
“Use it or lose it” is not something confined to government; it can effect every organization, public or private. It’s just a matter of how your budget process is organized.
Most JPL engineers don’t even make half of that, and engineers don’t get those other benefits either. The JPL work week is 80 hours every two weeks… but many people work 50 hour weeks and sometimes 100 hr weeks during crunch times. JPL does pay its engineers more than the rest of NASA (though at rates comparable to other aerospace companies in LA) yet JPL keeps costs at or below other NASA centers (when you do total cost accounting). You can either hate the FFRDCs (JPL and APL) for their market pay and mission successes or you can instead ask how to replicate it at other centers.
The sequester is a nasty thing that has nothing to do with NASA, and that NASA can do nothing about. It makes no sense to turn on each other when we should be working to help each other get space exploration done in this mean old world.
Here’s a petition in support of increasing funding for NASA.
http://wh.gov/t0k6