NASA OIG Reports Progress on Efforts to Rightsize but Key Decisions Still Pending
NASA OIG: NASA’s Efforts to “Rightsize” its Workforce, Facilities, and Other Supporting Assets
“Through the TCAT and CLM processes, NASA has established a framework that should improve the Agency’s ability to manage its technical capabilities and help make the difficult decisions regarding infrastructure and personnel required to optimally position itself for current and future missions. However, after more than 4 years, the Agency has yet to make many concrete decisions about its technical capabilities – for example, to consolidate or dispose of assets. Rather, most decisions have been iterative steps on the path to making actual determinations about technical capabilities, leaving us concerned that the Agency’s efforts have been slow to produce meaningful results.”
Judging from the lack of comments, many people might find these reports dry and uninteresting. I’ve supported these analysis and exercises though and find that the problems they point out are close cousins of the bigger issues that people get all excited about. VERY close cousins.
The reports recommendations are good ones. I would add that a missing piece is about incentives. When calculating a return on investment, who gets the return and just how real is it? Incentives tend to be strong when the return on some action is tangible, close, immediate. Incentives to do these analysis and exercises AND act on the recommendations are weak to non-existent when the return is a number on a piece of paper, abstract, far away, and especially when it accrues to someone else.
Address incentives and the recommendations will take on some teeth and get shaped into practical specific actions.
I agree this is an important area. I was discouraged by the number of references to “rightsizing”, many of them in quotes. We are talking about CUTS. Cuts in basic and applied research at an agency that was chartered (in 1915) to do basic and applied research in cooperation with industry. If OIG can’t speak plainly, maybe they should be “rightsized”.
Better yet, would someone from OIG please join the forum and explain what you are trying to achieve? Let’s have a discussion, not an argument.
The reason research facilities aren’t utilized isn’t that they can’t be productive, it’s that NASA has cut funding for research, particularly research conducted at the organizational level by scientists and engineers with good ideas and connections with industry and academia. The scientists and engineers have no “charge codes” to buy cheap nuts and bolts and use their time to operate underutilized facilities in collaboration with industry and academia, and learn useful knowledge. The money instead is going into huge programs with nebulous objectives. Why doesn’t OIG question them?
My reference to incentives is largely about the efficiencies that “rightsizing” gets NOT becoming cuts to the budget, but rather turning tangible efficiencies from getting rid of old, unused facilities into NASA research or other project dollars. Otherwise the incentive is NOT there for anyone to do a good job right sizing and getting a star sticker from the teacher. The benefit goes to someone outside NASA pointing to some arid report that some old facility or some old work skills are off the books. Ho hum. Even I wouldn’t get enthused – and I’ve been there in these tasks.
Last time I saw someone really passionate about getting an old facility demolished or just off the books it was ONLY because there was an ability to take the money at the top line for facility maintenance and still keep it ALL, 100%, regardless. Playing around and being able to MOVE the $ elsewhere, like to capital improvements in another facility was THE driving force. (Yes, legal, creative, and it can be done). That’s real “right sizing”.
If there I anything in the OIG report about closing facilities that are old, obsolete, and consuming money better used elsewhere I would be happy to support it. After reading the report I can find no evidence of it, and would welcome any examples you can provide.
The primary criteria appear to be “mission needs or facility usage data”. What is the mission? Sending four civil servants to the Moon or Mars at $>1B per flight? Or providing practical benefits for America?
Moreover, the first item to be “rightsized” is the workforce. It’s no wonder that state-of-the-art labs are underutilized because they aren’t given any personnel or funding to advance science and technology.
That is a pervasive problem. How can managers identify things which are “old [and] obsolete”? The easy but inaccurate measure is “facility utilization data.” If noone is using it, it must be because noone wants to. As you point out, that’s not necessarily the case. A better metric would be the number of people _requesting_ funding to use those facilities. If a hundred scientists asked to do so, but only two could get funding, one hundred is a better measure of the value of the facility than two.
Really good points. How many people are _requesting_ funding to use the Vehicle Assembly Building, NASA’s largest single facility? Spectacular to be sure, but it is an aging structure, very expensive to operate, and was designed for a processing scheme (high launch rate of Saturn V missions to the moon, requiring up to four in simultaneous assembly) that never came to pass. The up-and-coming launch providers (SpaceX and Blue Origin) are already using and/or building modern assembly and manufacturing facilities at a small fraction of the cost.
Some of the older wind tunnels have been outmoded by computational fluid dynamics. Others are still useful. But the more basic materials and analysis testing labs and structural fabrication and testing facilities, many of which are well equipped with capable instruments and equipment, could be far more productive if provided with modest but consistent operating and research funds, rather than totally divorcing funding programs and research facilities.
You are correct that the OIG report, and even the very term rightsizing, has a workforce slant, not a facilities slant. The OIG report doesn’t provide some needed history that would lend perspective.
1 – Practically speaking, once NASA got more efficient in some areas, such as with the commercial / partnerships for ISS, the usual ratios of civil servants to procurement dollars was thrown a wrench in the cogs. What to do with the unused civil servants?
2 – This happened at the same time that the Shuttle was winding down, leaving many operational organizations with little to do except await the developments that were quick to say they did not need operational involvement. (As little sense as that makes).
3 – The third leg of the problem was that R&D got shifted hard over to “D”, a very mission oriented “D”, the SLS and Orion development, for which again there was a skills mismatch. Too many R&Dish people had never actually seen their work leave the lab or test bed.
4 – Lastly, to finish adding fuel to the fire, the SLS and Orion NASA program management did not want civil servants, preferring procurement dollars, assuming the top line was all they needed to fit into. I personally saw high level SLS management put forth insulting comments about the civil servants they were told to employ. Full such latitude was not allowed in the end.
Because there is no RIF authorized, and alternately there is little latitude with funding movements, and with workforce reassignments, rightsizing has been reduced to a set of contrary goals, or vague goals at the least. True rightsizing would have to increase flexibility across the board to the favor of individuals, who I find have a very good sense of what they can do best. Unfortunately, the contrary is happening with the new center roles definition, if anything more of a straitjacket that will make rightsizing, making the most of people and facility dollars, impossible.