At least the first time I’ve heard it.
McCain just called for an end to cost-plus contracts in the debate.
I don’t know if they can be eliminated, but they should sure be cut way back. But good luck with that.
I have to say that so far, McCain is not doing very well. He’s letting Obama get away with a lot of lies and sophistry, calling him on very little of it.
[Update on Saturday afternoon]
I’m pretty sure that this is the first time that cost-plus contracting has come up in a presidential debate. It was really quite bizarre. I can’t imagine that it’s an issue on which the election will turn, and I suspect that 90%+ of the listeners had no idea what he was talking about. I’m not even sure that I know what he is talking about (in terms of what the basis of his objection is, and what specific examples in his experience prompted this strange utterance). I doubt that it had much to do with NASA, though–I’m sure that he was thinking of Pentagon contracts, where much larger budgets are at stake, and there have been some recent notable expensive procurement failures.
The good thing is that it’s clearly something that he takes seriously, and may try to do something about as president. But I suspect that it would require either an overhaul of A109, or at least a major reinterpretation of it by whoever the new SecDef, NASA administrator, and OMB directors are (not to mention GAO). It would constitute an unimaginably major cultural change in the federal procurement community, in a culture that has developed over several decades.
Which is why I first said, “good luck with that.”
[Sunday afternoon update]
Based on some comments, I have a follow-up post to this one.
Rand and all —
I’m reminded of a conversation that I had with Vern Raburn a couple of years ago. Vern was having a hell of a time selecting suppliers for his Eclipse very light jet project, and one of the reasons was that most aerospace subs were so morally and ethically crippled by cost-plus that they couldn’t even understand why anyone would want to use what are best supply-management practices in every other industry. He wound up using many non-aerospace subcontractors, with mixed results.
The FAA let the weather-briefing part of the agency, Flight Service, go to a cost-plus contract “managed” by Lockheed Martin. If you write enough of a convoluted, DOD/NASA-style rec, only the big DOD primes will bid on it, and that’s what happened here. Naturally, costs exploded while the functionality of Flight Service essentially disappeared. In place of the weather experts of yore, pilots now get briefed by room-temp-IQ Wal-Mart and McDonald’s refugees, in telemarketing-style boiler rooms thousands of miles away, reading from scripts.
The pilots’ outcry met the same kind of response the grifters at Lockheed Martin give a Congressional hearing: an attempt to buy their groups off and a publicity blitz, and no effort to improved the failed product.
Fortunately, airlines do their own weather briefing and can bypass the failed (but ever increasing in cost!) Lockheed Martin-FAA system. Private pilots are using the Weather Channel and NOAA websites to figure out the weather themselves, and just calling Flight Service to check the regulatory box. This is typical of how DOD projects work (all the way back to the TFX/F-111 and beyond). Failure is rewarded and the project is excused for never meeting its original goals, but limps along, ever expanding. Sometimes they even make it kind of work on some subset of the original goals (as the F-111 came to do some twenty-odd years after its introduction).
However, while I share Vern’s view that cost-plus is a moral sinkhole and a monumental waste of tax money, I ultimately share your view: lotsa luck fixing it. Like Dr Pournelle says, nothing happens until the crooks in congress “wet their beaks.” For them to get their taste, there has to be a massive surplus in the contract/earmark for the contractor to kick back.