As others have said: they should (or, rather, it's perfectly reasonable if they do) try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. As someone wh

As others have said: they should (or, rather, it's perfectly reasonable if they do) try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. As someone who pays taxes, I am very happy for some of that money to be used to provide jobs. (Of course, jobs doing something; if you have evidence that NASA is in fact paying people to do nothing, or to do useless things, then please feel free to provide it.) I didn't take offence about anything. I mentioned that the slide was taken out of context because, er, it was, and that might be relevant -- e.g., because there is a considerable difference between "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at whether it will provide jobs" and "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at a dozen things, one of which is whether it will provide jobs". For instance: Suppose one of the other slides says that a criterion they use is some measure of efficiency: useful stuff achieved per unit money or time spent. Then what seems to me to be the only reason for objecting to "more jobs => better" largely goes away. (Let's have an even more specific, albeit rather artificial, example: suppose two of their metrics are "jobs provided" and "likely stuff achieved per job provided", and suppose the way they combine them is to multiply together. Then that is exactly equivalent to the single metric "likely stuff achieved", which I hope you would not object to.)