Thus, the proportion of Indian employees to the total number is likely to be lower than the figure provided in this AAPI category. The second part of this social media message is also economical with the truth: the CEOs of the companies listed are of Indian origin, and not Indian citizens. This article first appeared on Alt News. Nor were such positions, even if approved, to become in any sense the property of the agency requesting them; whenever a slot was no longer required for an approved position, the Commission would consider Government-wide needs in deciding what to do with it.
The more NASA sought an increased number of nonquota positions, the more chary the Commission became in granting them. Macy, Jr. Unfortunately for NASA, the dollar level of its programs was not a reliable index of its requirements.
NASA spent comparatively little on salaries; the bulk of its funds went for contracted hardware systems. This meant that as NASA's capital equipment increased, the agency would continue to need highly trained personnel for the kinds of scientific programs that such equipment made possible. The new Electronics Research Center was still only partially staffed, and planning for Voyager and Apollo Applications was under way, while in October the transfer to the Kennedy Space Center of responsibility for unmanned launches meant that a new block of positions would be needed there.
The upshot of the matter was a compromise. NASA agreed not to seek more GS personnel; instead it would use some [ ] of its forty excepted slots on the understanding that they would be converted to grade GS at the beginning of FY If this account of NASA's authority to fill excepted positions shows anything, it is the great importance that top management attached to them.
Webb, Dryden, and Seamans fought hard to extend that authority by persuading Congress to raise the level of excepted positions, hiring nonquota personnel where excepted personnel were unavailable, reserving as far as possible a certain number of excepted positions for "quick hires" of executives from outside the agency, and doing what they could to keep the center directors and program associate administrators at the highest levels authorized by the various salary acts.
In some ways, NASA's record in justifying its supergrade positions was outstanding. One ranking CSC staff member advised Macy that, of all the supergrade positions, those from NASA had "the least water in them, of any of the agencies and departments. Despite their significance for top management, excepted positions comprised a small fraction of the NASA work force, seldom more than 2 percent.
One must turn elsewhere to derive some useful generalizations about NASA employees as a whole and to consider the more general features of agency personnel policy. Four features seem noteworthy: the generous allotment of supergrade and excepted positions for the agency's top managers; the unusually high proportion of scientists and engineers in relation to the total work force; the use of military detailees as project managers, support staff, and, of course, astronauts; and NASA's extensive use of support service contracts at its newer centers.
The first and last features have already been discussed; the next section considers the ways in which centers like Marshall Space Flight Center and Manned Spacecraft Center or program offices like Tracking and Data Acquisition made use of support contract personnel.
This section considers the makeup of in-house personnel. A high proportion of NASA personnel were scientists and engineers, a higher proportion, perhaps, than in any other Federal agency doing research and development work. Moreover, if the figures for in-house and contractor scientists and engineers are combined, the total was a constant one-fourth throughout the period. But these figures must be examined before their significance becomes apparent.
First of all, who are scientists and engineers? Are statisticians and computer Table Characteristic Contractor scientists and engineers 7 12 25 48 68 72 77 64 51 Percentage of contractor employment The matter is further complicated because scientists and engineers were grouped by NASA under three separate occupational codes.
NASA defined scientists and engineers as "all persons primarily engaged in the performance or direction of scientific, engineering, mathematical, or other technical professional work requiring a 4-year college major. Of the total, all but an insignificant number of scientists and engineers were grouped under occupational code scientific and engineering positions , a classification that included persons with aerospace technology qualifications.
NASA personnel controlled the examination at the critical points: they administered it, they rated it, and they gave it much of its specific content. The aerospace technology examination "provided a means for NASA to fill almost all of what could be termed its 'professional' positions. This, combined with the power of the Administrator to make 'excepted' appointments, gave NASA almost complete control over whom it hired.
Where did NASA obtain its newly hired scientists and engineers? The major hiring campaigns occurred in and ; the results are shown in table Approximately 70 percent of newly hired scientists and engineers came from either industry or Government.
In the source of new technical hires shifted significantly from Government to industry, while recruitment from colleges and universities stayed constant at 23 percent. All this was in marked contrast to contractor experience: Most of their new hires came from other industrial organizations or other plants and divisions of the same company, with an insignificant percentage recruited from Government.
Where were in-house and contractor scientists and engineers employed? Table , which gives the essential figures as of 30 June , reveals that 85 percent of the scientists and engineers in the NASA work force were employed by Source Difference. Total Source: Reply to Sen. These figures also show that while How did NASA requirements for scientists and engineers compare with national requirements in the same categories? Table shows that NASA manpower requirements were 4. The issue of national manpower requirements for specialists was a source of some confusion during the mids.
Journalists, scientists, and Congressmen who criticized the space program accused NASA, among other things, of siphoning off scientific manpower from areas with greater need, of possessing a disproportionate share of the nation's scientific manpower, and of attracting to itself a greater number of scientists and engineers than its programs warranted.
But such criticisms simply ignored the lack of a national policy to coordinate the distribution of scientists and engineers. Nevertheless, there was no formal agency to coordinate or to make a unified national science policy; therefore, each agency was free to recruit personnel to meet its own needs, subject only to budgetary restrictions. In the absence of Total 81 58 2. Year 1 Jan.
For through , these data are estimates of persons employed in existing positions. For through , the data are projections of requirements, not supply. For what they are worth, the figures in table show that NASA requirements were neither as great as its critics feared nor as small as its defenders anticipated.
One feature that the tables do not indicate is that in the s the NASA work force was mostly white and male, especially at the higher levels. The issue of equal employment opportunity EEO was not yet the source of difficulty it would later become, when the imperative for NASA of recruiting and retaining highly trained personnel collided with the demands of blacks and women for a greater share of Federal jobs. This and subsequent executive orders were ambiguous in a crucial sense.
The burden of proof was now on the agency to show that minorities and women were adequately represented as a percentage of full-time employees. But there was no basis for arguing that one group was or was not represented adequately until one answered the question, "compared to what? On the other hand, since 3. The procedures could not be worked all at once but only on the basis of accrued experience.
Moreover, NASA faced the problem of comparable pay in hiring the relatively few black scientists and engineers who were coming on the market in the early s; most of them could go into industry at salaries considerably higher than NASA was authorized to pay. In any case, NASA had all it could do to keep the engineers it already had, much less hire new ones.
Until , EEO was handled by two separate divisions on a part-time basis. Since both offices had many other responsibilities, EEO was relatively low on their list of priorities.
Furthermore, there were genuine difficulties in coordinating these programs on a Government-wide basis. On the other hand, each agency was responsible for establishing and maintaining its own program.
One of the more important of these services was the detailing of military officers to NASA for extended tours of duty-usually [ ] for three years with a one-year renewal option. When NASA was established, the only persons with experience in the kinds of projects the agency was expected to implement were officers involved in weapon systems development. A short list of military detailees form the Air Force makes its own point: Lt.
James W. Humphreys, Jr. Bolender, Program Director for the lunar module. An incidental advantage of using detailees was that they did not count against the numerical ceiling imposed by the Bureau of the Budget on personnel. This established a procedure for coordinating NASA requests with what DOD was prepared to furnish; set the tour of duty at three years, although either agency could terminate an assignment earlier; stipulated that NASA supervisors prepare military effectiveness reports; and required that NASA reimburse the military departments for pay and allowances.
There were 77 detailees with NASA at the end of , at the end of , and at the end of , after which the number gradually leveled off. Many detailees resigned their commissions after completing their tours of duty to take jobs with industry, and it was considered common knowledge in the services that "when they detail an outstanding [flag] officer to NASA, that is the last they see of him. While NASA continued to call on the services for manpower, from on positions were not filled with detailees until a reasonable effort had been made to obtain a civilian.
The selection of the astronauts deserves fuller treatment than the brief summary offered here, but a paragraph must suffice. Between and NASA selected seven groups for astronautic training. Over the decade, there was a trend from military detailees to civilian recruits and a shift toward the utilization of scientists in addition to test pilots.
In this sense, the history of astronaut selection reflects the changing nature of the manned spaceflight program. In the beginning what counted was the physical and mental stamina of the candidates, as well as their coordination and reaction time. Manned spaceflight first had to be shown to be feasible before the later Apollo missions, whose main purpose was scientific investigation, could proceed.
Astronauts were also expected to assist in developing future spacecraft and advanced flight simulators, and their experience and judgment were essential in changing or freezing [ ] the design of existing flight equipment. The recruitment and training of the astronauts was, without doubt, the most taxing and successful of NASA's personnel development programs.
The reader might suppose that since NASA was committed to contracting out for most of its operations, all the centers and program offices used contractor personnel in the same way and to the same degree. This was not the way support contracting worked. In Langley, with civil service personnel, had only support contractors actually working at the center.
Lewis, with civil service employees, had about support contractors, almost all of whom were at the center's Plum Brook Station. In the first were the "mission support" contracts negotiated for each of the center's nine laboratories; these were in research, test, design, and "special maintenance and operation. At Marshall and also at Goddard there was one prime contractor for each laboratory or division for which support was provided, each contract covered one or two years with an option for renewal, and the contract was normally cost-plus-award-fee.
A noteworthy point, and one that distinguished Marshall from the older centers, was that most contract personnel were stationed on-site in such a way that they were not always segregated from civil service employees. At Kennedy there were five master contracts that supported the center across the board: 1 launch support including advance storage, shop operations, and Complex 39 ; 2 instrumentation support; 3 base communications operation and maintenance of all communications except administrative telephones ; 4 administrative service including printing, photographic support, and automatic data equipment operation ; and 5 base operations including guard, janitorial, and motor pool services , which, under a consolidated contract, was provided by Trans-World Airlines.
As a congressional study noted,. At MSC the pattern was midway between Marshall's "one contract per laboratory" approach and Kennedy's five master contracts. MSC used six master contracts for the same number of functions; within the mission support contract there were subsidiary contracts, one per laboratory. Since the policy issues in contracting for support services are fully discussed in chapter 4 , only the main points need be summarized here.
NASA defended contracts for nonpersonal services for the following reasons: 1 the rapid buildup of the Gemini and Apollo programs precluded reliance on civil servants alone, 2 it was NASA policy not to develop in-house capabilities that were already available in the private sector, 3 NASA employees were needed for technical direction rather than for hardware fabrication or routine chores, 4 NASA had developed safeguards for policing its contractors, 5 it was better to let the up-and-down swings in manpower take place in the contractor, rather than the civil service, work force, and 6 the practice of using support service contractors had been fully disclosed to Congress and the Bureau of the Budget.
Support service contracts were for functions that were repetitive, continuous, and routine, such as computer programming, data processing, and general maintenance. But relying so heavily on the private sector for maintenance services laid NASA open to all sorts of criticism.
First, there were no cost studies to prove that contracting for services was less expensive than doing the work in-house. Second, because many contractor employees were located on-site, there was the danger that they would be intermingled with the civil service work force and that NASA employees might find themselves supervising contract labor, which was illegal. Third, some Government labor union officials suspected that NASA was using support contracts to circumvent personnel ceilings imposed by the Bureau of the Budget.
And this suspicion might have drawn support from Webb's correspondence with Budget Director Kermit Gordon, in which Webb protested manpower restrictions imposed by Gordon. Outside the Federal Government, most of the opposition to support contracts came from organized labor, especially the American Federation of Government Employees. Within the Government, NASA manpower and contracting policies were closely watched by several agencies, notably the U.
Established by the Budget and Accounting Act, and headed by the U. Comptroller General, GAO is an independent agency of the legislative [ ] branch. Its principal function and the reason for its importance is the authority vested in it "to examine the manner in which Government agencies discharge their financial responsibilities and to make reports to the Congress on the financial operations of the Federal agencies.
When Elmer Staats became Comptroller General in March , the processes of audit and comprehensive review were intensified. It is authorized to consider protests by unsuccessful bidders on Government contracts, and it has the right to audit the records of contractors having Government contracts negotiated without advertising, an authority whose significance for NASA is obvious. Thus GAO reviewed supposed cost overruns on the development of scientific instruments for Surveyor, the management of the S-II program by North American Aviation, and the same company's management of its Apollo command and service module contract drawing on excerpts from the Phillips report ; undertook to examine the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory program at the request of the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics; and reviewed scheduling practices related to the development of the Nimbus spacecraft.
The effects of GAO audit reports varied. In some cases Congress took no action; in others GAO terminated a report, either because of inadequate manpower to handle the study or because the study itself did not seem worth pursuing.
It has been NASA policy since the early s not to invoke executive privilege in response to GAO requests for documents; this had been the [ ] issue between Glennan and the Comptroller General when the latter reviewed the negotiations leading to the Rocketdyne contract for the F-1 engine see p. Prior to agency replies were normally prepared and dispatched by the "cognizant" official or program office; a report on Surveyor would be answered by the Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications or his deputy.
Under the reorganization, all replies had to go through the Office of Organization and Management, which coordinated the facts and memorandums comprising NASA's position.
In this way, the agency could speak with one voice. By it was reviewing NASA activities like the space shuttle almost on a "real time" basis.
It intensified its review of NASA financial management systems, including the planning-programming-budgeting system mandated for executive agencies in It continued to review Government-wide use of automatic data processing equipment, especially the rental versus purchase issue.
It began to address more of its audit reports to agency officials than to Congress. Finally-and this is where the discussion began-it turned to NASA's use of contracts for nonpersonal services, from bid proposal expenses to contracts for base support at NASA laboratories and installations. And here NASA was vulnerable because it could not readily show that such contracts were less expensive and because NASA had few criteria to determine whether certain kinds of work should be done in-house or contracted out.
All these factors led to a NASA-wide review. This combination of budget cuts, reductions in force RIFs, or dismissing personnel and across-the-board reviews had an effect on top management that may be called tonic by some and purgative by others. Review, reduction, and RIFs must be understood in terms of a broad context. CSC had to mediate between an agency that needed but could not easily request more nonquota positions and a Congress that was inclined to question the number already on hand.
As for relations with the Executive Office, Webb summed them up with his usual frankness at a meeting with center directors in September Referring to President Johnson, he said that. Webb and the others conceded that there would have to be changes, but the meeting broke up without consensus on the nature of the changes. In the area of manpower management the agency already had begun a blueprint for the future. One was the relation between space sciences and manned spaceflight and the changes in center roles that this relation would bring about.
The other was the so-called "Marshall problem," the belief throughout NASA that Marshall "was the source for manpower needed elsewhere and the place where surplus manpower would occur as the Apollo Program phased down. How could headquarters mediate between two centers reporting to the same program office-like Marshall and MSC-with different attitudes toward this problem? Was manpower a resource available to the entire agency, one that could be shifted freely between centers?
And was there any method by which NASA could determine how its work force [ ] was utilized, the nature of that work force, and its availability as programs were terminated and others were begun? The last question is logically anterior to the others since, without accurate figures, no agency manpower plan could be realistic. Also, all postgraduate programmes pertaining to science and technology would have an in-built component of research. The University Grants Commission is also identifying performing universities so that they can be given 50 fellowships to carry out research in basic sciences.
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