Tag: Congress

Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

8:56 am

Chicken Little report: Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

It seems that each of these companies, finding their profits from defense pork to be relatively flat or dropping slightly, worked harder to sell their other products to other customers, and were generally successful. What a concept!

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The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.

9:12 am

The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.

The article linked above is mostly about Boeing’s effort with its CST-100 spaceship, but within it was this significant paragraph:

Last week, the House Appropriations committees approved $500 million and Senate appropriators $775 million for commercial crew development as part of NASA’s 2014 budget. The first figure is well below the Obama administration’s $821 million request, a figure NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has characterized as essential to meet the 2017 objective. Nonetheless, agency and company managers believe legislators are losing their skepticism over a program that has so far committed $1.4 billion to competing vehicle designs from SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and others. [emphasis mine]

Congress is still insisting that NASA spend far more for the Space Launch System (SLS), but they do appear to be increasingly less interested in cutting the new commercial crew program. Eventually, a light will go off in their dim brains and they will realize how much more cost effective this program is compared to SLS. I expect this to happen sometime in the next three years, It is then that SLS will die.

Note that I don’t have any problems at all with the above cuts to the commercial program. It is far better to keep these private efforts on a short leash, thereby forcing the companies to stay lean and mean, than to give them a blank check (as has been done in the past and with SLS) and thus allow them to become fat and lazy.

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The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.

12:06 am

Surprise, surprise! The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.

Contractors seem pleasantly surprised that the automatic spending cuts are not hurting nearly as much as the industry’s lobbying arm warned they would in the months leading up to the sequester that took effect in March. [For example,] Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected. [emphasis mine]

The article specifically mentions the doomsday lobbying effort of the Aerospace Industries Association, As I noted back in December 2012, that lobbying was a lie. There is so much fat in the government that sequestration could have been three times bigger and it wouldn’t have done these contractors any serious harm. The inconsequential nature of those cuts now is illustrating the reality of this truth.

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The plundering of NASA

3:30 pm

From one of my readers: The Plundering of NASA: an Expose, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership. You can buy the ebook edition here, and the print edition here.

I just finished reading it. Boozer’s introduction and opening two chapters provide one of the best detailed summaries explaining clearly why the United States today cannot launch its own astronauts into space, and why we are threatened with the possibility that we won’t be able to do it for years to come. And while his perspective is mostly from an engineering perspective, he also gives some of the political background behind this situation.

His later chapters are not as effectively written, but the opening is still worth it.

I will give a hint about his thesis: it involves comparing the Space Launch System (SLS) with private commercial space. And SLS does not fare well.

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Under pressure from her fellow legislators, a Maryland congresswoman has withdrawn her proposal to close the Marshall Space Flight Center.

8:45 am

Business as usual: Under pressure from her fellow legislators, a Maryland congresswoman has withdrawn her proposal to close the Marshall Space Flight Center.

As I wrote yesterday, this is government, and our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities. Gotta protect that pork!

This also illustrates quite nicely why NASA can’t build anything cheaply, which means it can’t build anything at all. The agency is saddled with too much expensive fat which it is not allowed to trim.

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Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) has proposed merging two NASA centers to save money.

9:13 am

Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.

The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”

Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.

But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.

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The lawyer for IRS official Lois Lerner is pushing to get her full immunity in exchange for her full testimony to Congress.

9:57 am

The lawyer for IRS official Lois Lerner is pushing to get her full immunity in exchange for her full testimony to Congress.

The article makes two very good points: One, it will be difficult to prosecute anyone at the IRS for its harassment of conservatives, and two, Lerner’s full testimony is likely not going to have any earthshaking bombshells. She will state that the White House had nothing to do with the harassment (whether that is true or not), and that the harassment was merely the result of some bad management decisions.

And thus, the government’s power over us will rise, and freedom will experience another cut in its continuing death of a thousand cuts.

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The Washington Post admits that most of the Democratic claims that sequestration would cause disaster were either outright lies or a gross exaggeration.

10:43 am

The Washington Post admits that most of the Democratic claims that sequestration would cause disaster were either outright lies or a gross exaggeration.

I said it then that they were lying about the consequence of sequestration. I say now that they will be lying again when the the next sequestration cuts arrive in October.

I suspect you could cut the federal budget by at least one third, bringing the numbers back to what they were about ten years ago, and not notice any loss of service.

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The toxic combination of Obamacare and the proposed Senate immigration bill would create a big financial incentive for employers to hire non-citizens.

5:52 pm

Congress passes a law: The toxic combination of Obamacare and the proposed Senate immigration bill would create a big financial incentive for employers to hire non-citizens.

Under Obamacare, businesses with over 50 workers that employ American citizens without offering them qualifying health insurance could be subject to fines of up to $3,000 per worker. But because newly legalized immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges until after they become citizens – at least 13 years under the Senate bill – businesses could avoid such fines by hiring the new immigrants instead.

Not surprisingly, the idiots who voted for this immigration bill haven’t read it and have no idea this problem exists.

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A Democratic Congressman thinks it “is simply not fair” to make his staffers subject to Obamacare like everyone else.

9:31 pm

My heart bleeds: A Democratic Congressman thinks it “is simply not fair” to make his staffers subject to Obamacare like everyone else.

The problem it seems is that

Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting. The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

Well, ain’t that just too damn bad. As I say, my heart bleeds.

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