Last week the Heritage Foundation congratulated Rep. Chris Chocola (R-IN) for introducing an amendment earlier last month to the Science, State, Justice, and Commerce appropriations bill that forbids NASA from spending any money on an “artist-in-residence” program. (See my post on this subject from June 16.) Heritage’s Michael Franc admits that the money saved was “miniscule” (even after he inflates the cost of the program from $20,000 to $50,000) but that otherwise “efforts to shrink the federal behemoth will flounder.”
So did Rep. Chocola and his colleagues just save the American taxpayer $20,000? Well, not really. First of all, the amendment does not cut any funding from NASA’s budget, but instead restricts NASA from employing “any individual under the title ‘artist in residence'”. In other words, NASA can spend the same amount of money—or more—to similar ends, so long as it uses a different title.
Second is a topic near and dear (or perhaps simply feared) by those following the space agency: full-cost accounting. That is, Congress incurred some cost to “save” $20,000. Let’s say the floor debate on the amendment lasted just 15 minutes. Given an annual Congressional salary of $162,100, and assuming the average member works 3000 hours a year (10 hours/day for 300 days), this amendment cost nearly $6,000 in member salaries alone! And this excludes salaries for staff, printing, electricity, etc. All of this is lost in the noise when debating appropriations bills that run in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but are no longer insignificant when debating a $20,000 program. (You can certainly debate the details of the accounting above, but the general theme remains.) Sometimes a penny saved is something less than a penny earned.
How about an economist in residence program? That mights save $10-15 billion to accomplish the same ends or accomplish vast new ones for the same NASA budget.
Laurie Anderson is a left-wing beatnik who is against George Bush and knows nothing about NASA. So her token grant from NASA is perfect Rush Limbaugh fodder, which is why it caught the attention of the Heritage Foundation and Republican Representative Chris Chocola. But let’s look at what Chocola actually said on the House floor:
As a supporter of the space shuttle, Chocola isn’t really against NASA wasting money; he’s for it. He is the car salesman who sells you a luxury lemon and botches your loan too, but offers you a double refund when your quarter jams in the dealership vending machine.
For that matter, Chocola isn’t even against the rest of the NASA Arts program, which has commissioned hotel wall kitsch for decades. If you’re a NASA artist, bad taste is okay; leftist partisanship is the big no-no. (Okay, some of the NASA paintings rise above the level of kitsch.)
Sam: “How about an economist in residence program? That mights save $10-15 billion to accomplish the same ends or accomplish vast new ones for the same NASA budget.”
I nominate you, Sam. Though would we also get a “A third of a Humorist in residence?”
Micromanagement seldom pays. Just call in the director and ask him what the hell he is wasting money for, and then fire him if he doesn’t shape up.
Dr. Foust’s comment reminds me of a story a friend told me about a meeting he was in about ten years ago. They needed information on the satellite industry and wanted to buy a copy of the Teal Group’s annual forecast. Cost was $1000. Not a cheap purchase. But a group of about a dozen people sat around for nearly an hour debating whether or not to pay the cost, before deciding no. He said that once you factored in how much it cost to pay all of them, they spent more money discussing it than they would have to simply buy it.
As for the NASA artist program producing “hotel wall kitsch,” you’re quite wrong. There are at least two books out devoted to this art, and some of it is quite nice. At the very least, NASA often commissions artwork of planned missions or things that could not otherwise be visualized. Prior to the launch of Hubble, for instance, the only way people could see what it would look like was via a painting.
And let’s put this in perspective too–many government agencies commission artwork, or even have their own resident artist programs. The DoD does it, with positions like “combat illustrator.” NASA is not unique in this regard.
I did say that some of it is better than kitsch. But a lot of it isn’t! Renoir it ain’t.
But hey, de gustibus non disputandum est. I agree with the larger point that many government agencies have their own art. When Congress stoops to criticize an agency’s artists, it is a sign of deeper trouble.