Heads Up NASA People: A Storm Is Coming
Federal workers grow increasingly nervous about Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Washington Post
“To the president and his supporters who see a bloated bureaucracy with lots of duplication and rules that choke jobs, the budget cuts are a necessary first step to make government run more efficiently. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said this week that non-military spending will take the “largest-proposed reduction since the early years of the Reagan administration.” To prepare for that possibility, agencies are preparing to shave 10 percent off their budgets, on average. And words like buyouts, furloughs and RIFs (or reduction in force) – government-speak for layoffs – are now being tossed around at the water cooler as civil servants face the possibility of massive downsizing. Some of these strategies were used when Ronald Reagan was president and others more recently to meet the goals of budget caps known as sequestration.”
Keith’s note: As you all know it is much harder to lay off government employees than contractor employes. Yet that now seems to be what is in the plans. But if NASA is faced with making substantial cuts in its expenses then you can be assured that contractor personnel will bear a large part of the pain. Contractor employees have far fewer protections than civil servants. Also, in the past when budgets have gotten tight NASA has delayed solicitations, delayed and decreased the number of awards, and the cut the value of awards. With huge cuts in its budget looming on the horizon, you can expect that NASA procurement practices will respond to these cuts with surprising speed.
At the NASA Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop this week I asked a panel a question noting that there were “some very depressed people up on the 9th floor working on the budget passback to OMB”. I asked the panel “what sort of box outside of which they needed to be thinking they had yet to think outside of” when it came to dealing with these looming budget cuts. The panel dodged the question and paradoxically started to talk about doing more things rather than less. I reiterated the harsh reality that goes with a President who “thinks potholes are more important than planets”. Alas, the panel continued along their merry way in denial with some throw away lines such as “clearly we need to be doing things cheaper”.
A storm is coming folks. You cannot hide under your desks and try and to ride it out. Not this time. You need to be preparing contingency plans and be ready to try things that you have never tried before to accomplish the tasks you have been given to do. Otherwise those things will not get done.
Well said KC. Civil servants should remember the great amount of latitude they have practically speaking, a tool for such times too easily or conveniently forgotten.
Looks like this will make the RIF’s in the last few years look like a drop in the bucket and those were pretty bad around here. Explain again to me why we all do this space work, often for less financial benefit than equivalent careers in other engineering fields, with far less job security, and the constant knowledge that the can of our collective goals keeps getting kicked down the generational road. Combine all this with a public that is increasingly anti-intellectual, anti-science, and more insular, who for the most has never seen space exploration as the necessity that we do, and it’s a wonder more of us don’t opt out from the Sword of Damocles. It is disconcerting that despite our best efforts the space program may ultimately be a blip in time for future archeologists to talk about like the pyramids, not the springboard to eternity we hope for.
Other agencies may have to worry but I don’t think NASA will be downsized. Below are some comments Trump made Tuesday before his speech when he signed the “Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers and Innovators and Explorers Act” that promotes STEM education at NASA. It may put those comments he did make on space into perspective…
https://www.whitehouse.gov/…
“THE PRESIDENT: It really makes no difference. But this is the second bill that was signed, and that’s the H.R. 321, the INSPIRE Women Act. It ensures that the existing NASA programs recruit women to STEM-related jobs and aerospace careers. Great news. Really the way to go. Very heavy into the whole NASA situation. So women will be a big, big part of it.”
Doesn’t sound like budget cuts or downsizing to me. Of course if SLS/Orion is not able to produce it may be junked in favor of commercial options, but that would just be part of draining the swamp.
BTW, in his autobiography, Glenn T. Seaborg stated that after President Kennedy was elected they expect him to do away with NASA because of his comments on the Missile Gap and general lack of interest in space. He noted John Kennedy never even bother to make a statement about Sputnik when he was a Senator. What actually happened was quite different…
BTW I was surprised that I hadn’t seen anything on the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers and Innovators and Explorers Act. You would think space bloggers would be all over it given it name….
A skeptic would say that perhaps the Administration would only RIF males. Now what the remaining women would be doing is the question. You also say “if SLS/Orion is not able to produce” and that leaves open exactly what it is supposed to produce.
Produce is simple. Send humans BEO in this Administration, not in some very distant future date no one but a bureaucrat cares about.
BTW you should read Dr. Seaborg’s autobiography, the gloom and doom they felt about President Kennedy was the same I am seeing on blogs like this.
Send humans BEO – and there are a lot of people asking “Why?”. Send them to BEO and incur a lot of risk to accomplish what?
There isn’t even a need to RIF males, which could cause lawsuits. Offering incentives for early retirement is a gender-neutral policy. But older generations do tend to be less diverse. So letting the old people leave early would actually make the organization more diverse, and it would do so without any room for charges of reverse discrimination.
Properly managed, an enforced generational shift at NASA could be a long term boon.
Looking at this Administration, what are the odds it will be properly managed?
By “properly managed” do you include a way to preserve institutional/operational abilities?
I’m not sure how much needs to be “preserved” as opposed to “recreated”. Much of the genuine operational knowledge seems to be in the contractor pool, which is the first target in each RIF. So most of the real knowledge is already gone.
Too much of institutional knowledge is “this is how I was taught to do it, I don’t know why, the person who trained me doesn’t know why, but it’s the procedure.” And too many processes are a daisy chain of accumulated procedures without any whole-of-process overview; because adding steps is easier than removing them. Every so often you need to start from scratch just to see what breaks, what is actually is important and what’s just accumulated institutional baggage, or what’s no longer necessary and may actually be making things worse.
But, as I said, it’s a process that needs to be intelligently managed, with an awareness that you are playing with potentially dangerous things, that problems will occur. Trial and error means expecting and planning for the errors.
And I’m not sure you can do that with an ageing workforce. IMO, NASA is too top heavy. The average age of NASA employees is around double what it was during Apollo. That’s fine for a historical railway museum, but not if you want them to be able to create something new, to adapt quickly to change and challenge. (And I’m saying this as a… gentleman of a certain age… not an overexcited 20-something. I’m dissing “my people”.)
Why is rampant ageism OK at NASA where even a whiff of sexism or racism is justifiably not tolerated? I would take jaded experience any day over enthusiastic cluelessness! Could it have something to do with the salaries of the older staff?
IMO, NASA’s ageing employees are not “experienced” in a useful way. Some obviously are. But talk to anyone who works there and they’ll repeat complaint after complaint about the sheer volume of know-nothings trying to justify their own existence with make-work; and of acres of managers who’ve never run a successful program.
This isn’t, after all, the workforce that built Apollo, it’s not even the workforce that built STS.
(The average age of NASA hirings is greater than most aerospace companies’ management. Hardly “ageism” to recognise an existing bias and aim to correct it. It would be the same as recognising a lack of women and minorities and adopting an affirmative action hiring policy.)
The bias is that most older staff are inexperienced know nothings. Care to say that about any other group at NASA?
This is so true with regard to my org. I have coworkers who are still (in the year of 2017) using the fax machine to send correspondence. Every procedure is counterintuitive to what we are trying to achieve, and is maintained simply because it’s what’s been done for the past couple of decades, or because another Center is doing it. Trying to get everyone on the same page is an exercise in futility, because some people haven’t been doing their job for years.
Hard to see how making America great again with footprints on distant worlds comports with a 10% NASA budget cut but who knows if this President will even pay attention to what Mulvaney does while Trump spouts platitudes – any more than his comments on NATO, the EU, the UN or Russia as a threat – all of which got walked back by Trump appointees.
Contractors will probably take the hits first of course and no doubt NASA will once again bring more work in house. But always remember that Presidents PROPOSE, Congress DISPOSES; thanks to the tea party, they won’t get their defense funding increase through without Democrat support and Dems wont support DOD budget cap relief without non-DoD budget relief as well – this is far from over and this unpopular President may become even more so as his Administration continues to flounder.
Hard to see how NASA will come out unharmed regardless of any of this. Requires too much wishful thinking.
Is the law that prevented NASA civil servants from being laid off still in effect?
There is no such law. Civil servants can get laid off for any number of reasons. But the process is lengthy, difficult and generally something no one cares to bother with. An unproductive civil servant could be fired, but it would cost more time and effort to do so than simply letting him stay in place. That hasn’t changed. I believe there are some avenues the President could use to fire civil servants more easily. If he found that an agency’s job had radically changed, I think changes in staffing levels would bypass most of the civil service regulations. That hasn’t happened yet.
And Civil Service laws can also be changed, a reality that’s been hitting hard at the state and local levels for over a decade.
There certainly was such a law, but it may have expired. That is what I was asking. This article says it expired in 2007. https://www.crainscleveland…
I’ve got a somewhat different take on the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop and the response to your question. First, to put in in context, the panel/discussion part of that session started off with a complaint from the guy who organized the meeting. He said all the presentations had focused on how people wanted to do all sorts of science in the next 35 years. But, according to him, that wasn’t what the meeting was supposed to be about. He wanted to hear what science people were interested in and why it was a great thing to do. (I’ve noted in the past that he’s the sort of person who thinks scientists should provide the goals and justifications, and then step back and let the managers and engineers figure out how to do it.) I think that biased people against your question (which was all about how, not why). I know I had a specific “how” comment, but decided to make a different, policy/goals-oriented comment instead.
When it comes to the response, with only a few token sentences about doing things cheaper, I had a slightly different impression. As you noted in another post, the discussions weren’t very well organized and people were talking past each other. (E.g. on several occasions, someone wouldn’t have a chance to get the microphone while one topic was being discussed, did get the mike ten minutes later, when something else was being discussed, and tried to drag the conversation back to the previous topic.) I’d say there were a few people who did want to have a serious discussion of how to do things for less money. Admittedly, they were mostly talking about doing more with the same budget, not dealing with lower budgets. But that’s still lowering cost. Unfortunately, and possibly because of the organizer’s initial comment, for every person saying something about lowering costs, there were half a dozen or a dozen who wanted to talk about the big picture of what they wanted to do. Realities of limited budgets got lost in that, but I think at least a few of us were seriously concerned and interested in that reality. (And, in my own defense, my entire presentation was about how a bunch of us want to do something _and_ already know we can do it on the cheap.)
Present NASA projects as military related and you are golden.
That didn’t turn out too well for Clementine. They got the mission, but it was a half failure and the lunar data was pretty ratty. You can’t get great results unless you can tell the managers your work is a core part of the mission goals.
Back to $17B? 300M from Space Tech 500M from Earth 500M from ISS 400M from IT and CMO 100M from Aeronautics?
There is a probationary two-year period for new NASA employees. They can be terminated at any time.
There has been recent reluctance to RIF too many contractors. NASA has learned (the hard way) that there is a lot of valuable knowledge that could be lost.
What had been happening over the recent lean years. Some centers used the opportunity to excise out the under performing contractors, while take major efforts to retain the valuable people.
I could see that IF there is a significant budget impact, the initial reductions may come from the recent new hires.
So this bold new back to the Moon with SLS/Orion along with budget cuts/layoffs, I’d list that effort in the good-luck-with-that dept. Now we have SpaceX do hard turn and vector to the Moon with flyby next year even though FH and D2 have yet to fly. Then we have BO announcing plans for the Moon. This immediate race to the moon with unproven hardware on all fronts is only going to exasperate financial situation especially with cutback on infrastructure, I think of Korolev/Mishin pressured to get N1 operational while Politburo cuts their resources.
NOAA – 17 percent passback downer https://www.washingtonpost….