NASA's Silence on Furloughs (Update)
Message From The NASA Administrator: New Policies in Response to Sequestration
“In addition, as I have previously stated, at this time, we do not plan to resort to furloughs for NASA employees to meet our spending reductions under sequestration, and there is currently no change to the Agency’s existing hiring policy. Centers may continue to transact hires in all categories as planned in their submitted phased hiring plans up to their FY 2013 FTE ceilings. However, the Congress is currently considering NASA’s full-year appropriations levels; and, as the legislative process concludes, we will assess the impact of the new funding levels and whether revisions to our current posture are warranted.”
Keith’s 22 April note: Furloughs loom across the Federal government. While other agencies openly talk about their furlough plans, NASA is not saying anything. Why is that? It has been a month since Charlie Bolden issued this memo and its mention of how NASA viewed furloughs. Nothing has been issued since then.
Keith’s 25 April update: Bolden in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee today: “If we do not come out of sequester for the 2014 budget then we will start to furlough people.”
Furloughs underway, but uncertainty remains for many workers, Washington Post
“Defense officials said that no final decisions have been made about furloughs for the department’s 800,000 civilian employees. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the House Armed Services Committee last week that “hopefully we won’t have to” furlough employees. He added that the department hopes to “at least minimize it.” … EPA officials said employees now face fewer than 10 days of furlough, rather than the 13 days the agency had warned. … Labor, which had said that 4,700 employees would face six days of furloughs, now says that 4,000 workers will be furloughed an average of five days. … Other federal employees are expected to start their furloughs in coming weeks, including 8,400 employees from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, up to 80,000 Internal Revenue Service employees, and 12,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
Many NASA civil servants I work with (I’m a contractor) exhibit the attitude, “What are they going to do, fire me?” knowing full well they never will be. I think the agency’s culture of lifetime employment is a morale buster since job performance seems never to be tied to keeping or losing your job, as in the private sector.
In this case, the attitude probably is, “What are they going to do, (eh-heh-heh) furlough me?”
NASA Watch began as “NASA RIF Watch” in 1996 as a result of clear and determined planning to fire lots of contractor employees and to RIF NASA civil servants.
That is interesting bit of trivia Keith. That helps the name make sense.
Apparently they succeeded with the first part of the plan. Possibly that eliminated the need for the second portion.
You are irrelevant KC. Your comments are skewed and filled with jealousy and hate. NASA is a point of pride for the many civil servants & contractors who work there. Piss off…
Feel better now? Have a nice day.
Keith – I agree with Isabel. In many cases you post very useful information. In this case, you are way off base. We have been told there will be no CS furloughs. If and when that changes, I am sure we would be notified.
“Stillastillsfan” you can’t use your real name to say these things, now can you?
This has been my username since I registered. I am happy to give you my name (Don Roth). But how pertinent is it to my reply? I am starting to think you have a bit too much time on your hands if your reply and even the topic itself is important enough for you to editorialize on.
Keith’s note: I am fascinated that a reader thinks that I spend too much time paying attention to what they say. Hilarious.
Stay classy
33:
Civil servants cannot be fired in the sense that you are used to, unless they have done something REALLY over the top, usually reserved for crimes, traffic in pornography, etc. What happens in the CS is that your job, or if it is really a broad effort your organization, is abolished. This gives the CS the option to see if his skills, as noted in his/her position description, can be used where a junior CS is working. The senior can then “bump” the junior. Typically, if you are going after an individual, you make sure their PD is such that they cannot do anything other than the job they have, and then you maneuver to abolish that position. As you might guess,it is a lot of work to do this, so it rarely happens.
This is not, as you suggest, a morale buster. On the contrary, it helps morale as short of a major organizational abolishment, they will have a job somewhere (even if they have to move to another facility). It is, however, never good to decouple job performance from job reward. While this is not the case uniformly in the CS, as long as you do a nominal job, you will get an increase in pay and grade. You may top out at a particular GS level (e.g., GS14-10), but you have a good paying job.
The initial statement is not, literally, true. A civil servant who repeatedly performs unsatisfactorily in his/her performance appraisals can be reassigned and even terminated if the performance does not improve. It just takes an enormous amount of documentation, hassling with unions, and typical government h.r. bureaucracy. Sometimes, it’s just not worth the manager’s effort to rid themselves of a single chronic underperformer when they and their motivated employees have work to get done to meet deadlines — which is most technical folks in NASA.
Not to quibble, but outside of government and academic employment, with tenured staff, someone can be fired and shown the door (often escorted by internal security) with little or no notice. That does not happen in NASA. The process is, as you describe, a long and painful one, so much so that most managers will not take the effort. The path of least resistance is to reassign in NASA, rather than try to terminate. Also, no one is saying that the NASA workforce is a bunch of lazy and or incompetent individuals. My experience, both as an insider and out, is that the boots on the ground NASA staff are dedicated and capable people. Not as much can be said for the leadership sadly. There is an arrogance, that was justified in years gone by, that they were the best. It isn’t true any more, and the sense that the best and brightest aspire to work at NASA is simply no longer true in general.
My lovely wife is the head of business management for a govt contractor which means she is in charge of HR among other areas. I can assure you that terminating a contractor employee for cause is no easy or quick task. Her crew spends countless hours gathering data and making a solid case before moving to terminate an employee. Then, many times, they spend a lot more hours and dollars dealing with post-termination litigation. Granted, it takes more effort to terminate a govt employee and make it stick but one should not trivialize the effort it takes to terminate a private sector employee. It’s true the private sector professional employee gets virtually no official notice but they have plenty of practical notice because they know full well what they are doing and the potential consequence of their behavior.
Unless under a union or similar contract, an employee of a contractor is employed “at will” and can legally be fired at any time for no reason at all. However the employee cannot be fired because of certain specific reasons, i.e. race, gender, etc. The employee’s only recourse for litigation would be to prove discrimination on the basis of a reason not permitted by law. Civil service employees have employment contracts and can be fired only “for cause”. They can be laid off due to a RIF but generally have the right to bump an employee with less seniority, which nonunion contractor employees do not have.
You can trust me on this one because I see her dealing with it every day, many terminated employees litigate and the company has to deal with it. Very few prevail or even get to court, but many do litigate and it takes several hours of HR and legal services time to resolve each case. She is with a medium sized company, about 950, and she would be overjoyed, and work many less hours, if it was really as easy as you think.
I am a civil service employee and I do not have an employment contract so I kind of feel left out. I am represented by a CB group and I have no choice in that matter. I pay no dues but I am represented by them anyway.
Sorry I spoke loosely. Civil Service employees have automatic rights under federal law that are similar to those provided to company employees only under union or similar contracts, even without an explicit employment contract. Consequently your rights in retaining your job are quite different from mine. http://www.politifact.com/t…
While I can understand your wife’s frustration with the need to put significant work into informing terminated employees that they really do have no recourse under law, the fact that they invariably fail confirms they have no such protection.
I don’t consider this unfair per se, it is a recognized benefit of federal employment. However it can make it difficult for a manager to assemble the best and most appropriately sized ream, and it encourages contracting (which adds to cost) for tasks that are in reality continuing and unique to the organization, and which would be more efficiently done in-house.
I understand what you’re saying about at will employment but consider that 11 states, ours is one, have good faith and fair dealing exceptions and under that nebulous blanket a judge can pretty much render whatever decision he wants, thus the extreme measure of care her and her folks take. For instance, an employee can be terminated for time card violation and you would think that would be an open and shut case, but in our state the employee can claim they were unfairly singled out (i.e. others are doing the same thing as me but they didn’t get fired) and a judge may side with them. Our state is one of the more employee-friendly in the US. In our state many terminations are litigated and some prevail while others are settled, but I don’t remember any of her’s being reversed in 10 years because she is very thorough.
Our state has a burgeoning list of wrongful termination attorneys so there is most definitely a market for their services. It’s just another color of ambulance chaser in my book.
Probably the reason why there’s a culture of lifelong employment is because, with very few exceptions, NASA civil servants are high performing, highly committed people. This is not always the case in the private sector.
Not in my 27 years experience. They are no better and possibly worse than most private firms, in part because they never have layoffs and because they will transfer people to new positions they have little or no training for simply to keep the headcount up.
If the work isn’t there FTE’s are created for CS personnel. Contractors get fired. There are some very capable CS people but there are many who are rewarded for creating meaningless concerns, nonsensical requirements, and inefficient and overstaffed programs. I don’t think they are malicious, it’s just the environment we have created where the products that are rewarded are presentations, reviews, headcounts, and micromanagement.
33, maybe you work at a center with a large amount of civil servants. Check out a center with few NASA employees and you may see a decidedly different attitude
In the examples you gave, the planned furloughs changed. If NASA still has no plans to furlough, why should they repeat themselves?
I know, I know. Why keep employees up to date about the status of their employment? Openness and transparency are such old fashioned concepts.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Importance: HIGH
Subj: Important information regarding your employment
Colleagues:
In the interest of openness and transparency, here is your daily affirmational email regarding your employment.
We did not fire you yesterday. (Unless we did, in which case, look for an email from HR.)
We do not plan to fire or furlough you today.
We did not change your health insurance.
We did not change your TSP.
We did not change your work schedule.
We did not move your physical office.
We DID change the seat height of your office chair. It’s a little higher now. Hope you like it.
We did not change your life insurance.
We did not modify your performance plan.
The cafeteria still serves grilled cheese, and it is still terrible.
<message truncated=””>
Didn’t you know that NASA stands for NEEDS ANOTHER SALARY
AUGMENTATION. Even JPL job postings state “enjoy a competitive salary
and impressive benefits”. Boy O boy are their benefits outrageously
impressive. Engineers earning $265,000/yr, ridiculous….to do what?
Let them get real world job offers that justify their salaries and
benefits.
While the rest of the the USA goes without medicine
because they can’t afford it, and seniors can’t pay their rents, and
teachers are being laid off, and other govt agencies are having
furloughs, etc., etc., etc.
NASA NEEDS A REALITY CHECK
Quoth Keith: “Feel better now? Have a nice day.”
Do you? Have a great day.
Amen teri!!!!!! If these folks had to do any real world work they would die.
I don’t know who is getting that. I have worked here for 20 years as a senior scientist, and I don’t get half that. In fact, we’re paid less than our faculty colleagues in the same (geographical) area. Don’t get me started on the multiple pay freezes.
You do understand, I’m sure, that there are very few NASA employees at JPL?
there is enough areas to cut like CMO and others so that furloughs are needed. unless the cuts have been deeper than original estimated no need for an update since furloughs are still not needed.
CMO funds a lot of the small but practical R&D projects that actually provide something useful for Americans and jobs the economy.
not to mention some of the facility safety programs at some centers are CMO
There were RIFS at the end of Apollo.
Were there RIFS when the Station Reston facility shut down?
‘job performance seems never to be tied to keeping or losing your job’
Performance doesn’t seem to be tied to rank, promotions….it seems much more tied to what organization you are in.
NASA civil servant manpower is a pretty small fraction of the overall NASA manpower. There are about 20000 NASA civil servants and about 120000 NASA contractors by my estimation.
NASA hiring has been sluggish for years and most likely the first to be RIFed would be the youngest people with the least time in service. In order to dramatically and rapidly change the composition of the workforce you’d have to abolish the Agency and start over.
They still have a large buffer of contractors for cannon fodder before the civil servants have to wade into it.
NASA does its accounting differently than the DOD so labor costs are not broken out the same way (according to my line management) sparing the CS’s from the furloughs DOD is going through. Contractors, though……
NASA has quite clearly said that there will be no furloughs. There is no need to say it again.
NASA may buy out higher paid employees but never lay them off. They will lay off the contractors anytime they want to just as they always do.
NASA doesn’t lay off contractors, contractors lay off contractors . Contractors are a supplemental workforce and when they are no longer needed are removed . This is by design and therefore you shouldn’t be bitter .
The bottom line is that NASA has decided to shelter its civil servants from sequestration–which translates to contractors taking on the lion share of the impact– and these are not furloughs, they are permanent layoffs. Given this decision, you would think that NASA would take special care to preserve high-value programs. But I have heard of at least one case that I found simply unbelievable. Nearly the entire operational staff of the Center for Aerospace Information (CASI) has been sacked. CASI are the folks that create and maintain the NTRS (NASA Technical Reports Server) and the NA&SD (NASA Aeronautics and Space Database). What were they thinking! Mark my words, this does not bode well for those of us who rely on the accessibility of NASA technical information.
that is terrible, I use NTRS and START all the time
Even though there’s been quite a few layoffs of contractor employees in the recent past, I haven’t heard of any in the last few weeks that have been attributed to the sequestration.
From the outside it looks like NASA HQ is betting that the sequestration is a fake. Just a piece of political drama to fool Tea Party supporters in to thinking that spending is being cut whilst in reality the budgets are increased.
I don’t think the sequestration is intended to fool Tea Partiers, but rather the general masses into thinking the evil Republicans were cutting all these ‘beneficial’ government services. Funny as to how it was the President’s idea and most of the ‘beneficial’ services being cut are high visability services. JMHO, sorry if it too political for some.
But as sequestration is real, it is something that NASA really needs to address with a plan and good communication to the workforce. The fact that there are still some confusion and questions as to what exactly NASA is going to do certainly points to poor communication (not necessarily that they don’t have a plan.)
Had the Obama Administration taken the opportunity it was presented with and let the Bush Tax Cuts expire there would have been additional tax revenues and some hope for preserving human space exploration. As it is, taxes will be cut permanently and NASA will have to jettison at least one major program, i.e. Webb/unmanned science, ISS/Commercial crew, or SLS/Orion.
“My experience, both as an insider and out, is that the boots on the ground NASA staff are dedicated and capable people. Not as much can be said for the leadership sadly. There is an arrogance, that was justified in years gone by, that they were the best. It isn’t true any more”
Very well said. I know in human space, many of the leaders try to justify their high ranks by the positions they hold. In earlier years they justified their high ranks by their accomplishments. Of course in HSF they do not seem to have been accomplishing anything significant in a long time. Is one thing the result of the other? Once I had one of the top Houston ISS managers extemporaneously speak to a group and we figured out he really did not know anything about the ISS-didnt know the size, numbers of assembly flights, names or purposes of modules, countries involved, origins of the design..Really quite pathetic.
It is the same in the public and private sector…a great deal of those in leadership/managerial roles are only concerned with biding their time to retirement or trying to move up the food chain. The good ones are few and far between. I worked for more of the bad ones than the good ones.