[evanjrowley]

As a contractor, I absolutely agree with all of your points here about the downsides of contractors.

I worked for several years on a few amazing contracts where we had the freedom to pivot and respond to changing needs. My most recent one however is terrible, but I believe it's due to a much more complex set of issues.

The organization is embroiled in decades long internal turf wars, leading to a culture of independent silos. The government must be perfect, therefore, each silo must be well-managed. So you end up with bureaucratic management processes duplicated across these silos. Regulatory obligations are growing more complex all of the time, so the processes become too entropic for the small silos to handle, and then leadership deteriorates. In a place like this, 50% of a contractor's job is to be the bureaucrat's human shield for when SHTF.

Just like the adage "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" there seem to be places in government where nobody ever got fired for making things too complicated. A recalibration is long overdue, probably not for NASA, but definitely other places where the overhead really isn't worth the result.