Civil servants cannot be fired so its mostly a lot of middle aged guys waiting around to retire. Where you are based geographically makes a dramatic difference to your experience and quality of living, e.g. you probably don't want to go to Alabama - unless you already live there. The daring and innovation of the 1960s is long gone, except where it survives in a few isolated pockets. It's old school thinking. Managers care more about how things look to their superiors than the well-being of their engineers. Foreign nationals make up a large fraction of the work force, but it is almost impossible for them to become civil servants, without becoming a citizen. So there is no job security for green card holders, you can only be a contracted worker. Some bogus middleman "body shop" company takes a 40% chunk of the money that NASA puts aside for your salary and upkeep. Also, in my experience, some member of the executive branch of the civil service treat contract workers like they belong in a lower social class, even if they have been working on NASA projects for a decade. Definitely that feeling pervades the whole agency. Bolden knows very little about science, hardly surprising given his background as a pilot. NASA's budget in real terms is now 10% of what it was in the 1960s. If you get grants from other agencies, the NASA center you work at keeps 25% of it before you see a dime. Bureaucracy is everywhere, its like a Dilbert comic strip.
