NEW: A Strategic Framework for Defending American Economic Interests From The EU's Reckless CS3D Directive

This is the third and final in our article series on the EU directive CS3D and how it affects American business, in collaboration with Baron Public Affairs.

This was exciting work on an important topic. We recommend you read and share.

The Case For Direct Political Control Of NASA

As ever, Elon Musk has been tweeting (xeeting?) up a storm, this time about proposed reforms to NASA.

The proposal itself is straightforward: integrate NASA into the Cabinet through DOT, placing it alongside agencies like the FAA that already regulate commercial space operations. This would end NASA's 67-year status as an independent agency and create direct political accountability through a Cabinet secretary who answers to the President and Congress. Secretary Duffy, who is already Acting Administrator of NASA, is pushing this reform.

Why does Musk disagree?

The immediate catalyst was Duffy's recent announcement that NASA would reopen SpaceX's $2.9 billion lunar lander contract to competitors like Blue Origin, citing schedule delays in Starship development.

Musk opposes folding NASA into DOT because he views it as embedding the space agency within a fundamentally regulatory bureaucracy rather than transforming it into an agile, innovation-focused organization. DOT's primary mission involves regulating transportation systems and enforcing safety standards. Placing NASA under this umbrella would mean the space agency reports through a Transportation Secretary whose expertise centers on regulatory compliance rather than aerospace engineering or mission architecture. From Musk's perspective, this doesn't reform NASA's dysfunctions; it reinforces them by adding another bureaucratic layer between technical decision-making and executive authority. He sees the proposal as preserving the very administrative pathologies—slow decision cycles, risk aversion, political rather than technical priorities—that have produced cost overruns and schedule delays.

The problem with this is that NASA is already a bureaucratic nightmare, and it seems obvious that its status as an independent agency is part of the problem.

As this epochal essay by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski shows, the culture of bureaucratic lethargy and risk aversion dates all the way back to the days of the Space Shuttle, with Challenger in particular having made things even worse.

The contrast with SpaceX's iterative development model shows this. SpaceX has a culture of iteration, accepting that some rockets will crash and seeing these as learning experiences. The company's development velocity, accepting short-term failures as intrinsic to learning, has produced reusable launch systems at costs orders of magnitude below NASA's architectures. This represents a fundamentally different institutional relationship with risk: viewing controlled failures as information-generating events rather than organizational crises requiring exhaustive process review.

NASA's independence has enabled the opposite institutional evolution. The post-Challenger and post-Columbia investigations embedded elaborate review processes, multiple oversight layers, and extensive documentation requirements designed to prevent catastrophic failure. These mechanisms, operating within an independent agency insulated from political consequences for schedule delays, have metastasized into what organizational theorists term "defensive bureaucratization." Every technical decision requires multiple review boards. Innovation that deviates from established approaches faces skepticism. Schedule timelines extend indefinitely as risk-averse processes compound.

The Space Launch System exemplifies this pathology. The rocket employs Space Shuttle-derived technology specifically to minimize technical risk through heritage hardware. Yet this approach has produced a system costing $4.1 billion per launch with years-long turnaround between flights. Those are performance characteristics that would be commercially unviable and operationally unsustainable for any mission cadence beyond symbolic demonstrations. NASA's independent status enabled selection of this architecture because the agency faces no competitive pressure forcing cost-performance tradeoffs. A Cabinet-level NASA, directly accountable for delivering on presidential priorities like returning to the Moon before China, would face immediate political consequences for proposing such economically inefficient architectures.

The "Voyager Declaration" signed by 287 NASA employees warning about current restructuring risks reveals this dynamic in microcosm. The dissent frames rapid organizational change and workforce reduction as threatening safety. Yet SpaceX operates with far leaner workforce-to-output ratios while maintaining actual safety performance superior to NASA's recent record. The difference lies not in personnel numbers but in organizational culture: one accepts that aggressive timelines and resource constraints force innovation, the other views any constraint as safety compromise.

Independence has enabled this risk-averse culture to persist because NASA faces no pressure forcing cultural transformation. An independent agency can indefinitely defer missions, extend development timelines, and inflate budgets while citing safety and technical complexity. Political accountability through Cabinet oversight would impose discipline: either deliver results on timelines and budgets that justify continued investment, or face leadership change and strategic reorientation.

The list of programs showing NASA bureaucratic dysfunction is very long. The James Webb Space Telescope, originally budgeted at $1 billion for a 2007 launch, ultimately cost $10 billion and launched in 2021. That's a fourteen-year delay and 900% cost overrun. Every design decision required multiple review boards, risk-averse management extended timelines to avoid any possibility of technical failure, and contractor cost-plus arrangements removed incentives for efficiency. The Mars Sample Return mission demonstrates this pattern hasn't improved despite decades of supposed reforms. After successfully collecting samples on Mars—the technically difficult achievement—the program faces cancellation because bureaucratic planning produced cost estimates of $11 billion for return mission architecture. Multiple independent reviews identified organizational dysfunction rather than technical impossibility as the cost driver: excessive management layers, risk-averse review processes requiring years-long approval cycles, and institutional inability to make firm technical decisions that constrain scope.

The Commercial Crew Program, ironically, provides the counter-example proving independence's dysfunction. Operating under fixed-price commercial contracts rather than traditional cost-plus arrangements, SpaceX delivered operational crew capability years ahead of Boeing despite receiving less funding. Boeing's Starliner, developed under identical contractual structure but with more traditional aerospace contractor culture, experienced massive delays and $1.5 billion in cost overruns that Boeing absorbed rather than passing to taxpayers.

NASA clearly needs political accountability.

Policy News You Need To Know

NEW: A Strategic Framework for Defending American Economic Interests From The EU's Reckless CS3D Directive — Third and final in our article series on the EU directive CS3D and how it affects American business, in collaboration with Baron Public Affairs. Read and share!

#HigherEd — DOJ has announced a new agreement with the University of Virginia. While Columbia University paid $200 million and Brown paid $50 million to resolve similar DEI-related investigations, UVA secured investigation suspension without monetary penalties or external monitors, requiring only quarterly presidential certification and data reporting through 2028. Critically, the agreement explicitly preserves federal non-interference in academic speech and curricula, a safeguard absent from the simultaneously-circulated "Compact for Academic Excellence" that UVA rejected alongside eight other institutions. In other words, it looks like a climbdown.

#Redistricting — New congressional map approved in North Carolina. The new map should position the GOP to capture 11 of 14 House seats, a net gain of one seat from the current configuration. North Carolina now joins Texas and Missouri in mid-decade map revisions that could collectively yield up to seven additional GOP seats, though anticipated legal challenges may complicate implementation timelines.

#Data #Governance — Former National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr, who was dismissed from her position in February following President Trump's return to office, warned during an October 21 webinar that massive staff reductions at NCES represent a loss of "statistical memory" for American education and result in "fewer eyes on the condition of schools." Even though it's natural to be skeptical, it looks like in this case her warning may be founded. NCES staffing has decreased from approximately 100 employees to three, with 169 contracts worth $881 million terminated, fundamentally compromising the agency's capacity to fulfill statutory obligations including rural school eligibility determination (which requires NCES-assigned locale codes for REAP funding), Title I allocation calculations serving over $18 billion to low-income districts, and the sampling infrastructure underlying NAEP assessments. The loss of this statistical infrastructure, and the decades of specialized expertise it represents, is not a good idea.

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#Sportsball #LawAndOrder — Arrests made in illegal gambling probe into NBA insiders including coaches, players and former players. Sports gambling is bad!

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NEW: A Strategic Framework for Defending American Economic Interests From The EU's Reckless CS3D Directive — Third and final in our article series on the EU directive CS3D and how it affects American business, in collaboration with Baron Public Affairs. Read and share!