Under the current Commercial Crew Development program, SpaceX contracts with NASA for a flat payment. If SpaceX comes in under cost, it gets to keep the profit. If it goes over budget, SpaceX has to make up the difference. This system gives SpaceX more flexibility to operate as it sees fit.
Shelby has inserted language in a Senate appropriations bill that would instead force SpaceX to work on NASA’s old cost-plus model. This would require the private company to track every step of its development, assign a cost to those steps and charge it to NASA, plus an additional fee. This stilted payment model forces engineers to be accountants and removes disincentives for bloated budgets.
Shelby isn’t forcing the company to cost plus. He’s doing something worse (and stupid), forcing them to account for it as though it were cost plus, but on a fixed-price contract.
This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:
May turns the cost issue around.
“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”
And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.
“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.
Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.
As Glenn says, this does seem like a criminal conspiracy by the Justice Department to deprive people of their civil rights because the administration doesn’t like the kind of (legal) business they’re in. They should certainly have standing to file a lawsuit. We have to stand up against these thugs.
Obama’s pass-a-bill-or-I’ll act strategy was not just tactically dumb (alienating the very House Republicans it was designed to coerce, stoking activist expectations of an imminent executive overreach to achieve a goal that wasn’t popular enough to sustain the overreaching). It was also substantively dumb – the actual policy assumptions underlying Obama’s proposals (that amnesty doesn’t act as a magnet for further illegal immigration) were disproved by the Latin American reaction to his initial pen-and-phone moves before House Republicans had time to be coerced.
Democrats are still putting on their Goodfellas faces and pretending they have leverage. Dem Whip Steny Hoyer promises a “significant change in policy” if the House does not act in July, according Breitbart News. Senator Dick Durbin says that if Speaker Boehner doesn’t act “the President will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration.” (I must have been sleeping in Con Law when they taught the Borrowing Clause.) Senator Robert Menendez defensively declares ”the threat of executive action is not a bluff.”
It’s a bluff. House GOPs should feel free to ignore it, at least through November.** If Obama takes any executive action before then, it will be of the most timid, face-saving variety.
Speaking of Con Law, it would have been appalling, if I weren’t used to it, to hear Xavier Becerra say on Fox News Sunday that it was OK for the president to ignore the Constitution and bypass Congress if what he was doing was popular. Those are the words of a caudillo. The Democrats seem ever-more determined to turn us into a banana republic.