GAO blasts NASA for purposely failing to control the budget of its SLS rocket
In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.
This one sentence from the report says it all:
NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.
That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.
This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
Neither the 5-year production and operation cost estimate nor the annual budget requests are a substitute for a cost baseline, and are poor tools to measure cost performance over time. As of July 2023, the program has not updated its 5-year production and operations cost estimate to reflect the current expected costs for the SLS program. Without regular updates, cost estimates lose their usefulness as predictors of likely outcomes and as benchmarks for meaningfully tracking progress. As a result, it is unclear what the current estimates are to produce SLS hardware covered by the fiscal year 2024 budget request.
Essentially, NASA has been given a blank check by Congress for its SLS program. For decades NASA has gotten this blank check because SLS has been a program wholly conceived and financed by Congress. It was not a rocket that NASA proposed, or even really needs at this point, with much better and cheaper options available from the private sector. Having been given it, however, NASA management has used it to provide the agency a large stream of ready cash, to both increase its staffing in congressional districts (thus increasing its power) while sending lots of cash to the big space contractors (mostly Boeing) that it has favored for decades.
I doubt this GAO report will change much. Congress likes NASA, and despite strong pressure from the Republican House leadership to impose real cuts on many programs, NASA’s budget has so far gone unscathed from those cuts. Expect Congress to make some ineffectual complaints about NASA’s poor budget practices relating to SLS, and then expect NASA to continue them, as it has for the past decade despite repeated negative reports from the GAO and NASA’s inspector general.
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
In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.
This one sentence from the report says it all:
NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.
That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.
This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
Neither the 5-year production and operation cost estimate nor the annual budget requests are a substitute for a cost baseline, and are poor tools to measure cost performance over time. As of July 2023, the program has not updated its 5-year production and operations cost estimate to reflect the current expected costs for the SLS program. Without regular updates, cost estimates lose their usefulness as predictors of likely outcomes and as benchmarks for meaningfully tracking progress. As a result, it is unclear what the current estimates are to produce SLS hardware covered by the fiscal year 2024 budget request.
Essentially, NASA has been given a blank check by Congress for its SLS program. For decades NASA has gotten this blank check because SLS has been a program wholly conceived and financed by Congress. It was not a rocket that NASA proposed, or even really needs at this point, with much better and cheaper options available from the private sector. Having been given it, however, NASA management has used it to provide the agency a large stream of ready cash, to both increase its staffing in congressional districts (thus increasing its power) while sending lots of cash to the big space contractors (mostly Boeing) that it has favored for decades.
I doubt this GAO report will change much. Congress likes NASA, and despite strong pressure from the Republican House leadership to impose real cuts on many programs, NASA’s budget has so far gone unscathed from those cuts. Expect Congress to make some ineffectual complaints about NASA’s poor budget practices relating to SLS, and then expect NASA to continue them, as it has for the past decade despite repeated negative reports from the GAO and NASA’s inspector general.
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
An expendable launcher with a single customer and a flight of once every two years, what could possibly go wrong?
Fiscal Responsibility . . . The final frontier, forever to be left unexplored.
It’s not that NASA’s fiscal irresponsibility could not be fixed without cutting the budget. All it takes is holding senior management accountable. By accountable I mean giving them targets and firing them if those targets are not met. If they cannot be fired, relieve them of their duties, and reassign them to an office in a closet with a bare steel desk and nothing to do (and no computer). They will quit when they get bored enough.
Won’t happen, though. Seriously, it would fix the problem if they did it.
“”””Seawriter
September 8, 2023 at 11:31 am
It’s not that NASA’s fiscal irresponsibility could not be fixed without cutting the budget. All it takes is holding senior management accountable. By accountable I mean giving them targets and firing them if those targets are not met. If they cannot be fired, relieve them of their duties, and reassign them to an office in a closet with a bare steel desk and nothing to do (and no computer). They will quit when they get bored enough.
Won’t happen, though. Seriously, it would fix the problem if they did it.”””””
Kicking butt and taking names works well in movies and novels. In real life it requires knowing what you are doing, having the motivation to do it, and exactly who to do it to. There is no evidence of this at high level NASA or in the congressional control of same.
To get the results you want, it will take a knowledgeable individual fully empowered to act, kinda like a CEO with compensation mainly vested in stock value. I see no cultural route to do that within the existing structures. Only as private enterprise gains momentum enough will SOME of these problems wither a bit.
My guess is the GAO serves the same function in the government as the Dilbert cartoons do in the office. It gives voice to concerns that no one is going to do anything about and everybody knows that nobody is going to do about. It is a safe way for the Federal Government to vent about its own failings so that people within the system don’t go nuts.
Cloudy—excellent observation. Kind of like how these chat/rant boards serve us.
The most recent Perun video (search on YouTube if you’re not aware of him; he’s very, very good) is about military procurement and just this issue: The system is working as designed. This isn’t like corruption, which everyone at least nominally agrees is bad, but rather trying to please as many constituencies as possible.
It’s a fascinating problem. Economic efficiency is far, far down the list of priorities – by design.