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Lockheed Martin announced today that it is closing down five facilities and laying off 4,000 employees.

Lockheed Martin announced today that it is closing down five facilities and laying off 4,000 employees.

This is actually good news for the company (reflected in a rise in its stock price today) as well as the taxpayer. Faced with less easy money from the federal government, the company is trimming some of its waste and unneeded fat. I am confident these cuts will have zero impact on their ability to operate and compete. If anything, they will improve the company’s abilities.

The cuts are also a recognition that the federal cuts from sequestration are not going away, even though those cuts have resulted in literally no visible problems in any federal program. To me, this is another demonstration that there was (and continues to be) plenty of fat in the federal government that can be trimmed away, without serious harm to any federal program.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • Pzatchok

    As long as they keep buying from the company I work for I don’t see anything really wrong with this.

    Actually ever since the sequester our company has expanded its client base. We used to do over 50% of our work for the big 6 government contractors. Now we have quadrupled our client base and cut government work back to a reasonable 30%.

    And since going world wide any bumps in the US economy are leveled out a bit by the rest of the worlds orders.

  • Tom Billings

    The major effect of the sequester I have been seeing is it being used as an excuse to *not* do whatever a particular section or Department didn’t want to do anyway.

  • Kelly Starks

    Cutting 1/4th of the staff of a company is not “.. trimming some of its waste and unneeded fat.”. Given by now that arn’t really competitors left, you’re basically seeing another part of our defense infrastructure die.

  • Edward

    Lockheed Martin’s Sunnyvale facility has been shrinking for two decades, and its capabilities have been shifted or moved to other facilities around the country. This seems to be the corporation’s overall strategy.

    However, I am worried about my friends who are still there.

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