From the Competitive Enterprise Institute's OpenMarket blog:
Over at Pajamas Media today, I tell a tale of crony capitalism that makes Solyndra look like a model of government probity and wisdom:
No,
it’s not Solyndra — it’s much worse, at least in terms of the amount of
money proposed to be wasted on it, and in other ways as well.
Let’s
call it “Shuttlyndra,” aka NASA’s Constellation, then called the Space
Launch System, aka the Senate Launch System. The Solyndra scam wasn’t a
federal contract per se — it was based on taxpayer-guaranteed loans,
which meant that the taxpayers would never have to pay off if it had
worked.
Shuttlyndra isn’t just a contract, but multiple sole-source,
no-bid, cost-plus contracts, guaranteeing that the taxpayer money will
be spent. And because of the nature of the contracts, in which the
contractors are reimbursed for time and materials regardless of results,
and there is no real competition, there is an excellent chance that the
taxpayer won’t get much for the money — at least if its predecessor
program, Constellation, is anything to go by.
NASA spent ten
billion dollars on Constellation over five years, and had little to show
for it except a very expensive and flawed suborbital test of a dummy
first stage, and a half-built capsule with uncertain requirements. There
is absolutely nothing to indicate that anything has changed in terms of
management at NASA to overcome the ongoing moral hazards that created
the waste the first time. It is really an intrinsic feature of
traditional NASA contracting that has resulted in failure after failure
after failure of NASA programs in their stated purpose. These failures
are never punished because in the minds of those primarily responsible
for funding it on the Hill, the real purpose is that the jobs continue
to flow.
The saddest thing, perhaps, is that, unlike the
supposedly novel approach to solar cell production ostensibly being
pioneered by Solyndra, it’s not even particularly high technology. The
program is premised on the notion that we have to maintain the same
decades-old “space infrastructure” that we’ve had since the 1970s, by
continuing the obsolete and costly Shuttle technology into perpetuity.
At least if Solyndra’s promises had been kept, we would have had a
useful new technology. But all that SLS gives us is a heavy-lift vehicle
that will fly rarely, for which no payloads have been defined or
budgeted.
But the biggest difference between Solyndra and
Shuttlyndra is the scale of the waste of taxpayer funds — and
that’signoring the billions already wasted. Shuttlyndra is planned to
consume eighteen billion dollars in the next few years, and much more
before it can do anything useful. Compared to that, the half billion
wasted on Solyndra is couch-cushion change. And Shuttlyndra will be the
negative gift to the taxpayer that keeps on giving, eating up billions
of dollars per year that could be spent on actual useful space hardware
for sending humans beyond earth orbit, until it’s finally canceled (if
the porkmeisters in Congress ever allow it to happen).
As
I note over there, the bad news is that this is bipartisan, and
actually mostly Republican (and some of it, in addition to the pork, is a
knee-jerk antipathy to anything that the Obama administration opposes,
even when it’s a sound policy on both technical and fiscal grounds)....MORE
I fear that last paragraph maybe the immediate cause of more than one heart attack at Media Matters and the Center for American Progress et al.
