NASA Makes Cuts in Travel Budgets
Update: 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference Presentations by NASA and JPL Personnel
“We have learned that NASA has severely restricted travel of NASA and JPL employees to the 2013 IEEE Aerospace conference. This is impacting many of the authors at this year’s conference. I, on behalf of the conference board and the conference committee, want to extend our condolences to those who are affected by the restrictions, and provide the following guidance with regards to paper presentations.”
Reader note: “Of course sunk costs like registration ($1000), lodging, and many flights are long past the opportunity to be refunded, so we’re not actually saving much money and causing a lot of trouble for employees, some of whom have personal expenses that will not be reimbursed.”
It is my understanding that this is due to Office of Management and Budget guidelines. These have been in place for some time – way before any registration stuff. So, NASA should have been making the decisions then. Rather, I suspect, the hoped the situation would change and got bit big time.
Should NASA have preemptively told its employees they can’t submit papers or attend conferences because sequestration *might* happen? That doesn’t really seem right, either. I think you have to blame Congress for this one.
Yes, it is due to Congress, not NASA – but the agency certainly knew what was in the works and could have used a little common sense. But no. NASA does not do that.
It’s not so easy. Suppose they used “common sense” and banned their workers from submitting to or registering for conferences, and then it turned out the crisis was resolved and everything was fine. That would be a missed opportunity and not “common sense”. I think this is a problem all agencies of the federal government are facing and it’s not just NASA that is struggling with it.
Really Keith. You think it makes common sense for NASA to tell it’s scientists that they should not expect to go to conferences to present their work or that systems engineers cannot expect to be able to travel to contractor sites for the forseeable future until the american public can elect rational representatives?
or that systems engineers cannot expect to be able to travel to contractor sites for the forseeable future
Who said that?
what is moronic about this is that travel cost is typically written into projects as a line item. The congress is limiting travel to supposedly “reduce spending” but in many cases that money has already been awarded.
So the PI for a project has x number of dollars to say visit a telescope for observing, or to present research at a conference, or to meet a contractor etc. But now they cannot spend that money for travel. Instead, they have the same x number of dollars that they must spend on something else.
I think the real problem here is that some people may have lost some personal “out of pocket” expenses.
The other costs are government funny money that, considering the bigger picture of sequestration damage, is irrelevant.