Fact Check On Doug Loverro's Departure
FYI about the whole @DouglasLoverro thing: he was not fired because of a dispute with @JimBridenstine or because @BoeingSpace was mad at him or because of *anything* having to do with @SpaceX #DEMO2 This has everything to do with lawyers & arcane intricacies of govt procurement.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 20, 2020
![Human Landing System Post-Budget Tag-Up [Audio]](https://nasawatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/HLS-1024x562.png)
“This has everything to do with lawyers & arcane intricacies of govt procurement.” Since this was a Tweet, this is necessarily vague, IMHO.
I’m hoping that in the future we’ll get some more details on the specific rule (or rules) that was broken here.
Does anyone know what the OIG does if a case they are investigating becomes moot? Do they still publicly publish a finding, or do they just shelve the whole thing? If it’s the later, then we may never know the details.
“Arcane intricacies?” Or just an obvious violation of the FAR?
The FAR are Arcane Intricacies to the average rational manager, something only a government or big corporate bureaucracy could love.
Mr. Loverro spent how many years in DOD? Must he not have been involved in multiple procurements during that time? Did he not have expert advice from NASA procurement personnel? Most of FAR, as absurdly complex as it is, comes down to common sense (within the government context) of full and open competition unless (1) there’s a compelling reason otherwise or (2) the dollar amount is so small that most of the rules are relaxed. It was never that hard to get used to, just a pain in the butt.
The FAR, like all bureaucratic rules, was patched together over many many decades, each chapter, sub-chapter and paragraph added to solve some past problem that may or may not be relevant to today. I suspect no bureaucrat at NASA or DOD knows every little detail of all 2,000 plus pages of it, not to mention the agency specific supplements all of which are subject to interpretation. It’s why it’s so difficult for government agencies to innovate, why the government pays so much more for everything they buy, and why it takes government so much longer to do anything.
Rules regarding governmental acquisitions are in place for very good reasons, among which are to provide reasonable responses when charges of rigging or other unfair practices are made.
Further, the charge that “the government pays so much more for everything they buy” is unsubstantiated. Two points here: relative prices paid for space-related super-hardware are a function, not of buying policies, but of the difficulty of the work, or of outside, political forces.
Actually, unit prices paid by my local governmental agencies on services for which I have expert knowledge are uniformly fair, and vey often below what I see when compared to relevant commercial acquisitions; the chief reason given is the reliability of payment, and the presence of detailed construction drawings.
Further, at least in the case of many NASA buys, there is a good deal of design and design development involved, costs of which are exceedingly difficult to predict; and of course many of the big ticket items obviously lack the advantage of commodities.
Certainly this is the case, and it is proper. Compare for instance much of the ‘legal lingo’ we hear; certain phrasings are easily called purposefully obtuse, but that’s far from the case. They are phrases passed upon by countless courts, making the meaning very clear. Similarly, certain documents are revised and extended in ways that build on previously understood meanings.
As to the time required to complete certain activities: it is not useful to compare governmental actives to those in the private sector. Why? The government is in a different category, and for good reason: many eyes necessarily review and assess expenditures, for one. Were it not so, many would complain about incomplete review.
Finally, generalized antipathy towards governmental workers, again, is not useful and is very often simply wrong. This is not to say that often, even though there are all of those admittedly annoying checks and balances, that mistakes are made. I simply object to the overly broad and negative paint brush used in characterizing agency employees.
Here’s yet again another bridge too far:
Here’s where any surprise might be found – NOT finding folks and indeed departments with deep working knowledge of every acquisition procedure.
Finally: The US government is a behemoth, to be sure. It is what is required to provide services to 350 million citizens, all of whom demand fairness, and accuracy. The Feds are also, as it turns out, consistently efficient: per capita expenditure by the federal government has been essentially flat since the 1950s, according to the St. Louis Fed.
A blast from the past, Democrat VP Al Gore and the ashtray built to government specs. Recall reinventing government was his big thing before he discovered climate change and focused on it. It is not just a Republican issue as you seem to imply but a bipartisan one.
https://www.newsweek.com/vi…
The Vice President’s Ashtray
By Newsweek Staff
On 8/15/93 at 8:00 PM EDT
“Al Gore is showing me this ashtray. It is a standard, regulation federal “ash receiver, tobacco, desk type” and Gore has 10 pages of regulations to prove it. He flips through the specifications, giggling. “Can you believe this?” he says. “It’s incredible. This is what you have to do if you want to sell the government an ashtray…”
“And the money wasted has become truly embarrassing-Gore has stories of $1,500 laptop computers routinely purchased for $3,500 (well, not routinely: in one case, 23 different officials had to approve), $3 notebooks bought for $6, and so on. These are not isolated cases; they are how the system works.”
Of course the bureaucrats, as bureaucrats do, pretended they were shocked and would fix it, but they knew the Democrat fad of reinventing government would blow over and they would be back to business as usual. And of course that is what happen. Bureaucrats know elected officials are only short timers who will get bored and find something else to focus on for the next election.
Also we are talking about the Federal Government, not local government. Recall I noted also big corprations are just as bad so its not just government. Bureaucrats need large organizations to blend in to. Railroads, giant retailers, automobile factories, big utilities…
Local governments, like small businesses, tend to be less bureaucratic because the lines of communication are shorter and they don’t have the budgets that are big enough to make vendors put up with it. Afterall a local city hall probaby wouldn’t get any bids for landscaping if the paperwork took longer than doing the landscaping. The contract would just not be big enough.
Particularly ironic now, because smoking AFAIK is banned in all federal installations.
And I am sure that there are pages of specs for “ash receiver, tobacco, external type” to guide the purchases of the ashtrays needed to be placed outside of federal buildings…
Not if smoking is also prohibited within a certain distance of the building (or on a whole campus or center.) But I’m pretty sure there are pages of specifications and acquisition approval forms for the “No Smoking” signs. Plus, perhaps, a report on how many are needed and where they should be posted.
There are – and they get flowed down to vendors as well. And the vendor has supply documentation that they have, in fact, installed the no smoking signs at the required height above the floor, that they are of appropriate size and typeface size and color, etc.
Some vendors have this ready to go, compliance verification is easy. Others, perhaps not. And maybe they think it’s silly, they’re machining parts, not smoking, in a state which prohibits smoking in the workplace.
Dr. M.: You are forgiven the logical fallacy involved when arguing from the specific to the general! No doubt an apparently endless list of questionable acquisitions could be made. of course! Given the scope of operations, even a very small percentage will yield many laughable examples! I will only point out in passing that there are also countless scores of laudable transactions concluded on our behalf by responsible professionals.
While we might both enjoy the ‘Ashtray’ story, it does very little to move the discussion, other than, of course, now looking much more closely at offered arguments.
(A minor correction: ‘Democratic’ would be proper here).
Reinventing government might be confused with an attempt to encourage congruity between procedures/policies on the one hand, and actual needs on the other hand. It’s a laudable effort, too, when approached with a degree of integrity, and by professionals equipped for the task; appointments founded on nepotism will fail.
Finally, on the issue of “short timers’, with could be the central point. Recent realizations that elected folks come and go, and that the government yet functions year after year, are exactly accurate. Indeed our government at every level depends on an army of professional managers, and others.
One key foundational idea of democracy is a government that responds to the will of the people, so Democrat Idea was correct.
https://www.dictionary.com/…
Democrat – an advocate of democracy.
Although I used an example of an elected member of the Democratic Party to counter your bias against Republicans there were also members of the Republican Party who supported his ideas for “reinventing” government.
The argument you are making that it is OK that an entrench bureacracy resists and ignores the ideas and directions of elected officials basically undermines the basic principles of how a democractic government is suppose to operate. The creators of the Constitution would be horrified to see a city like Washington full of bureacrats who act and seem to believe they have more authority and power than the elected representatives of the people. As I showed with the example using Al Gore it is an idea that crosses party lines.
Are you saying that in-place federal workers are somehow antithetical to the goals and objectives of properly elected officials?
Forgive me but this reads like whining from a roomful of babies, may of whom are in place with no actual knowledge in the arena they are to administer; moreover, these ‘leaders’ arrived laden with singular political sensibilities entirely opposed to the entire concept of government.
What else would be expected? Landing with no expertise of course there will be conflict with civil servants that have actual knowledge, and ability.
[And there’s a postscript here: At Energy, staff waited, and waited, and waited for the new bosses, eager for direction. Finally arriving, no briefing was sought].
The problem with the ashtrays (or hammers, or toilet seats) isn’t that they were bad purchasing decisions. It’s that someone like Mr. Gore could point to ten pages of regulations and specifications and requirements which were involved in deciding to buy that brand from that company. All that paperwork is expensive, and any company willing to deal with it will pass to cost on to the government. For larger contracts, there are minimum thresholds for much of the extra paperwork and regulation. But in some cases, you can’t buy a cup of coffee while at a conference, without getting a receipt and itemizing it on your expense report.
So some people will cheat. Taxi drivers know that: Half of them just give out blank receipts when asked of one, and many of their customers are happy to take it, fill it out themselves, and pad the numbers to cover the cup of coffee they forgot to get a receipt for. Obviously, something like the Artemis HLS contract isn’t a nickel and dime thing like that. But even at the level of those contracts, people can and sometimes do find ways to expedite matters and get around the rules. If they do it poorly, they get in serious trouble. If they do it well, no one notices or cares very much.
Is your point that assuring fairness and transparency has an associated cost? Certainly this isn’t news.
Or do you take issue with the coasts involved? It’s just fr too easy to cite examples that are ludicrous, or even silly; finding these cases is proper.
There’s an incremental cost to governmental acquisition; the burden of transparency, for one, has an acceptable cost. These deltas when located should be squashed, and quickly.
They should not be eliminated however.
So you think it’s okay to give a company inside information during a competitive procurement? I know that’s how the current administration likes to operate, but the FAR is there for a reason
I’m sorry but that simply did not happen.
This point can’t be over-stressed. We are talking over and over about hypotheticals.
Exactly how do you know that’s how the current administration likes to operate?
Like others who know him, I am amazed and saddened at his reported actions. This was no minor arcane infraction. And he’s an acquisition professional. He just thought it was necessary to give a bidder with a technically-favored mission approach some free advice, all because he thought it was more likely to succeed by 2024. As he said: a personal choice, with severe personal consequences.
According to another article on another site, what you say seems likely to be true. If so, it’s sad because Boeing’s proposal was so bad they were eliminated early on in the process. So he fell on his sword for nothing.
Also, I believe that it is a fallacy that the big orange rocket is the only way to get to the the moon by 2024. Distributed launch just isn’t as hard as its supporters make it out to be.
It’s interesting you wrote, “a bidder with a technically-favored mission approach.” Based on the ratings Boeing’s proposal received, I can’t see how it could be called “technically-favored.” There were two technically favored proposals with multi-element landers. They proposed multiple launches on rockets smaller than an SLS. I suppose “don’t rule out a single, pre-assembled launch” could also count as giving a bidder free advice.
I think that was an indirect reference to the single launcher approach which reportedly Mr. Loverro personally favored.
Well, I will say it. The only one likely to succeed by 2024 is SpaceX. The others don’t appeared to have even started bending metal or working out the bugs in their engines… So much for putting the good of the nation above bureaucracy.
Arguing in the world of hypotheticals:Without reference to this case: how would ‘the good of the nation’ be served if, for instance, one bidder had some sort of inside knowledge? Contracting might be burdensome, but the idea is to protect the ‘nation’, isn’t it, through a blind process?
Perhaps you are saying, as I think you are, that a larger goal might be in play, and that in service to the larger goal some small-ish irregularities might be tolerated; but this is a position without foundation, private or public.
The level playing field, as we have discussed before, is a core function of government.
A “level’ playing field gave the U.S. Army Air Corps the B-18 as its primary bomber before WWII. Fournately most of those that were forward based were destroyed on the ground saving the crews from flying them on what would have been suicidal missions. Forunately a few military officers put their careers at risk to get Boeing a contract to build the YB-17 even though by the rules it lost the competition to the B-18.
Ideology is nice, but it is important to recognize there are some exceptional times when common sense is also needed.
“Ideology is nice…there are some exceptional times when common sense is also needed”
Now I know for sure that you are toying with me!
It happens that you are completely correct, but have identified the wrong target. It is common sense that put in place the contracting rules under discussion. In stressful times, common sense provides a dispassionate path of appeal, and a way to fairly make decisions, without reference to personal sensibilities.
“Common sense is not so common”, obvious even to Voltaire all of those centuries ago.
It’s ‘common sense’ that provided “equal protection”, a concept serially protecting us from one another year after year.
Making allowances for human imperfection, we are a nation where fair play rules. Yes, we are tested, and we fail. Still nobody gets the inside track without adding complications to life, as Sen. Burr has learned. And, now, perhaps Mr. Loverro, though the facts are far from clear.
Common sense protects us once again, from hundreds of years in the past.
“…in service to the larger goal some small-ish irregularities might be tolerated; but this is a position without foundation, private or public.”
The foundation is practical. Violations of those acquisition laws are frequent and largely unintentional. It’s also common for someone sufficiently familiar with the system to make the field a bit less than level, while still staying within the letter of the law. So there is some unavoidable tolerance for infractions. And someone has to decide which infractions are and are not serious ones. And, sometimes if they know something would be considered minor, people know better do it anyway because they no no one will consider it too serious. If the rules were simple, easy to understand and uniformly enforced, it would be a different matter. Or if they had some built-in allowance for flexibility and individual judgement. But that’s not the case.
“The level playing field, as we have discussed before, is a core function of government.”
It certainly is in theory, …the problem is that it seldom is in practice. *All* human organizations have agency costs (the cost of each agent’s own desires and beliefs differing from the specified purpose). This inherent defect in hierarchies is not going away.
Arguing the difficulty of this ‘core function’ hardly takes away the importance.
sad to seem him go but let’s get down to brass tacks does his actions and the active IG Audit mean the whole HLS procurement is about to blow up? Is the Agency about to see a protest/or a forced recompete just as they are turning on the three commercial groups who have to race to build a lander in the next 4 years? or does this resignation give those like Horn in Congress the leverage they need to reset the whole plan back to 2028? Is the Agency going to the Moon or just going to go round and round getting nowhere again?
I came in today to ask and Keith delivered. I did already know that it was about the lander…and suspected that it was a government paperwork thing. However, if it is true that he prompted a bidding competitor, then he probably should have known better. That’s a simple ethics thing that even I have to be careful about…and I don’t work for the government.
What I wanted to ask Keith though, specifically, is does it have anything even remotely to do with some in Congress not having a say? I ask because these proposals are all straight up New Space and Congress was whining about that last week.
Yes, if anyone is able to shake all the details loose it will be Keith.
So Keith, it seems you know exactly what went on and what the story behind this is (or at least I’m inferring as much from your replies in the comments – I apologize if that is presumptuous), but provided you know why haven’t you clearly stated what it was and separated fact from speculation? Why did I have to read what likely went on at Ars Technica and not here? I’m really surprised because I cam here first for the cold hard facts after reading about Loverro’s resignation on CNN, like I have for 20 years, and didn’t find them.
I have posted what I know. I can’t post what I do not know.
Keith, can you clarify what prompted your post of “This has everything to do with lawyers & arcane intricacies of govt procurement.” ? As I understand it, Doug took responsibility for his action (which hasn’t been described). Whatever this action was, it must have been significant to prompt the IG to investigate. And Doug’s response (resigning) indicates to me that he felt this transgression would have a significant finding (and presumed that the investigation would not find “no harm done”).
I have posted what I know and what I can post.
You are the only one, in today’s world.
Thank you for your response. Basically you don’t want to cloud it up with conjecture, as informed as that conjecture may be?
Did the word get up the chain about Blue Origin being owned by Jeff Bezos? I can imagine the “off with his head” moment.