Always reactive to budget changes as with any government agency. As of late hasn't been trending well, particularly on the Space Exploration side.
The career ladder here is interesting; in order to progress up the GS scale (Civil Service pay scale and career ladder classification) it is initially based on experience and education level, as one would expect. To be promoted it is strictly based on direct supervisory decision, usually up to GS13. To go beyond GS13 (approximately $70k annual salary) the position must be competed, usually on USAJOBS. When this happens, the position is typically written for the individual in mind. Management can't just promote you to a higher GS, although they have the influence to create the GS14 position to be filled, assuming they have a slot available to create it (typically not possible during a hiring freeze). Additionally the position description to go beyond GS13 must include managerial duties of employees. So for the high performing researcher with a PhD who typically has limited people skills, to be promoted to a position with appropriate pay based on competence and experience you must also be put in charge of employees often times with no real training. So many times a researcher will take a position to be promoted and then subsequently fail at the management of employees in their charge and the program they manage. They will typically then leave the position to assume the responsibilities they had before while retaining the GS position and pay. This leads to many high GS positions in a branch that perform lower grade duties, leading to very high overheads and un-proportional work output.
There lies several of the issues for team leadership across many branches of NASA. Unqualified program managers who used to be researchers but got promoted to the position in the attempt to get a justifiable promotion based on their expertise. Also affecting this is the current hiring limitations. The average age of the NASA CS is approaching 50 with an average GS level of 13.36 with 18.75 years of experience, and these figures include students so those figures are misleading on the low end (hr.nasa.gov).
Needless to say, NASA needs to start hiring the next generation workforce as soon as possible. This opens the door for strong candidates, if they could entice them to come, but pay is on the low end when compared to private industry. Lots of potential and great work to be done, just completely burdened down by budget and red tape.
NASA is also lacking some direction. They have diversified their portfolio to garner congressional budgets every year but this has led to a loss of focus and very shallow workforce depth in many areas across projects. Need to trim the fat and focus on legitimate goals. Do a few things and do them well (Like we did with Apollo)
