OT/Current Civil Service Law prevents "housecleaning"
Tenure provisions of that law prevent firing incompetent employees. So any talk of reform is nothing but talk.
Firing top appointees will have ZERO effect as they have no effective control of their agencies anyway. The Federal Civil Service bureaucracy is a Frankenstein monster.
Write and/or call you congressman and demand that civil service tenure be repealed!!
There's not enough money in the universe to run a government that cannot get rid of incompetent employees. 100% taxation couldn't do it!!. The sooner this gigantic Turkey Farm is brought to an end with a new civil service law the sooner we'll get a functioning governmen that's capable of protecting the domestic security.
Until then, it'll nothing but press conferences, spin and bull crap. Don't take my word for it, folks. Just watch and see for yourselves. It's all agency head and their appointee subordinates can do. Meanwhile underneath the top mgt echelons, gridlock, paralysis, corruption and stupidity dominate all these agencies.
The FBI, HH&S, FAA....look at any agency and you'll find the same situation. Here's a recent story. NASA has now been exposed of being on the verge of collapse by British Newspaper.
Isopatch
observer.co.uk
<Nasa sucked into an $8bn black hole
Underfunding, unnecessary errors and a growing debt
have left America's space agency on the brink of
collapse, reports Robin McKie
Sunday November 4, 2001
The Observer
America's space agency Nasa - once a synonym for US
high-tech supremacy - is struggling for survival. In the last few
days, it has lost its chief, been revealed to have a staggering $5
billion debt, and been blasted by a committee, which includes
several Nobel laureates, for its utterly inept management.
Rudderless, and crippled with debt, the agency that put
Americans on the Moon is wobbling like a stricken spacecraft in
orbit. Few observers can now see the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration surviving - at least not in its current form.
The agency's main hopes lie with persuading Congress to bail it
out. It is estimated it needs $8bn to fulfil its commitments, a
vastly improbable sum given that America is on a war footing
and has priorities far removed from space travel. Instead, a
desperate slashing back of costs and missions seems the
agency's likely future.
It will be 'like throwing children to the wolves', chief administrator
Daniel Goldin admitted last week, shortly before he handed in
his notice.
Most blame the agency's woes on Goldin's philosophy of
pushing through 'faster, cheaper' unmanned science missions
while promoting the vastly expensive construction of the manned
International Space Station. In the former category, most
projects were so underfunded and ineptly managed they failed.
For example, in one 10-week period in 1999, Nasa lost a Mars
orbiter; a spacecraft intended to land on the Red Planet; and two
robot probes designed to burrow into Martian soil to search for
water.
In one case - the Mars orbiter - the mission failed because
engineers simply mistook metric measurements for those in
imperial units. The debacle was blamed on lack of resources.
By contrast, the space station - which is now being put together
250 miles above Earth - has sucked in cash like a giant black
hole. Originally touted as costing an exorbitant $17bn, its
pricetag has spiralled to an even more staggering $22bn, and is
expected to reach $30bn.
And for this, America will get little more than an orbiting
Portakabin. The ISS requires a crew of three to operate its solar
panels, power supplies and other services, while a further three
were expected to run zero-gravity experiments in biology and
material sciences, as well as astronomical and other research.
But now Nasa can afford to supply only the first of these
astronautical trios, so that for the foreseeable future - at least
five years - the station will simply have no one on board to carry
out the research. At best, its skeleton crew will be able to carry
out 20 hours of experiments a week. For an edifice touted as the
acme of high frontier science, a pathetic output to say the least
which has led to the agency being subjected to waves of
withering abuse.
On Wednesday, the criticism will reach a peak when the US
Congress's science committee will debate a newly published
report about the agency's space station activities. The study -
by the Independent Management and Cost Evaluation Task
Force - blasts the agency for 'deficiencies in management
structure, institutional culture, cost estimating and programme
control' and concludes Nasa cannot now move forward 'without
radical reform'. Massive cuts in space station and shuttle
missions are now seen as inevitable.
One favoured plan would be to strip the agency of running its
space shuttle, and to give it to a private operator. Nasa would
simply pay a fee to run missions on the spaceship it had
developed.
As one senior official at the European Space Agency - which
has become increasingly irate about Nasa's inability to meet its
international obligations - pointed out last week, the idea is
hideously reminiscent of the Railtrack fiasco in Britain.
'In fact, Nasa is just like Railtrack, except it operates
spaceships not trains,' he said. 'Like Railtrack it is expected to
run a service and at the same time to develop new technologies.
It cannot do both.' This inability may tempt the US government
to follow the path of privatisation, though the omens are far from
good.
Stripped of its shuttle-launching activities, and running a
denuded space station, would leave Nasa looking a sad, feeble
reflection of the once great agency that hoisted Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin on their way to the Sea of Tranquillity. The
administration will still have major science missions - space
telescopes and planetary probes - to run, but the future of its
manned spaceflight must now seem uncertain.
One possible role for Nasa might be for it to develop
replacements for its fleet of space shuttles which were first
launched in 1982 and which are now coming to the end of their
predicted useful lives. However, at present, the agency is
stymied by the basic problem that even if it did build a
replacement, it currently lacks any cash to launch them. Nor,
indeed, does it have any goals at which it could aim them.> |
