Trimming NASA

Doing less with more:

NASA’s long-standing practice of honoring retirees and contractors with lavish award ceremonies costing millions of dollars a year may be over. President Bush signed the NASA Reauthorization Act providing funding for the agency as well as tough new restrictions on conference spending.

I'll say this for Dubya: he's made a pretty good effort to rein in NASA and try to re-focus them. Not that it'll mean spit in the long run; the only way to truly reform NASA is to disband them and turn their jobs over to private industry -- where they should have been for the last thirty years.

Bryan O’Connor, NASA’s Chief of Safety, defended the practice at the time as a way to honor former employees and contractors. "It’s the cost of dinner and putting someone up in a hotel for a couple of days," O’Connor said.

And IT'S TAXPAYER MONEY, you arrogant ass. You want to throw lavish parties at company expense? Fine. Go into private industry and you can shell out the ducats for the fancy shindigs out of your own profits. But if you work for the people -- and you do -- then you just make do with the minimum required to get the job done.

And therein, of course, lies the real problem: NASA hasn't actually done anything worthwhile in well over 30 years. But I can assure you they get the absolute best of the best of everything. I know; I've worked at their facilities as a contractor. Every single item is top-of-the-line, every piece of equipment spanking new and very often esoteric to the point of obscurity. Their service contracts are invariably the most expensive available. The list goes on for some time, but you get the point. And this ass Mr. O'Connor has the unmitigated gall to cry foul about the taxpayers finally demanding some accounting for their money as it flows into the Black Hole of NASA. Tough. Back to reality for you, Bryan. Oh, and I'll take that fancy laptop... here, you can have my nine-year old desktop.