Their competence certainly has dwindled. A growing proportion of their budget is pork. Entire programs are just jobs programs. Those are very undesirable jobs f

Their competence certainly has dwindled. A growing proportion of their budget is pork. Entire programs are just jobs programs. Those are very undesirable jobs for good engineers. Constellation was an earnest attempt that strangled itself with process and procedure. SLS is just a battleground for politicians and contractors trying to keep the money flowing in their own directions. The NASA that people usually think about is found in the smaller projects, where they can go relatively unnoticed by those who would ruin them. But even then, there's probably too much risk aversion. The very idea of that kind of defeats the purpose of NASA, in my opinion.