Governmental Problems Why is NASA creating new jobs at the top with new titles? NASA’s structure was good enough to get us to the moon we don’t need a bigger agency with more red tape. Some of the new offices have titles which are not a clear indication of what their purpose is. Take for example the new office of the Chief Resilience Officer. It is described as NASA’s response to the pandemic and implementation of requirements related to it. My goodness do they think the pandemic will last forever? It certainly seems they are making plans for that. Another new office will be that of Vision and Strategy. I remember when I was in government as a mere civil servant watching as new titles were created and people hired to fill them who were given large salaries and had political connections and many positions which never existed before were created and really served no purpose. When I first started in state government, we were under an agency only which employed three people. When I retired that agency had over 1,200 and most of them knew nothing about what we did. The expansion of government on all levels just to create jobs for the relatives of donors, politicians and connected people is costing us billions of dollars. There is so much wrong with the idea. First of all, it is a tremendous waste of money, but that is certainly not the only problem. It adds to incredible amounts of red tape. Then there is the problem of people in charge who know nothing about the agencies they are in. Many want to make decisions without knowledge of how things should work so they can say they are in charge. I have seen some really terrible decisions. Some of these decisions make the everyday work in a criminal justice setting far more dangerous. One person given top authority decided they could tell an architect how to build a new building where prisoners need to be escorted from one room to another. The building was also to house civilians. The building was a court house. There is usually a back stairway or elevator where prisoners can be brought to a courtroom through the back way, but because of this person’s interference in the building design, the prisoners now had to be brought through the civilian areas where their relatives, friends and maybe gang members were sitting. When we talk about this kind of thing, it seems to be expanding. Sometimes it has no effect on the number of people working for an agency because as extra people are added to the payroll in positions they are not qualified for, people in the lower jobs are not replaced when they leave or retire to balance the payroll. This in turn really hurts the agency and this can be seen in a lot of places in government. One of the big problems for most governments up to the federal government has polls have shown politicians are not trusted very much. It is across all lines. It exists in all races and in all ages to varying degrees. One of the big changes which causes this is the availability of so many news outlets. We know a lot more about what is going on than we used to, but this is a double edge sword because we are also told things which are not true and they are presented by the media as facts. To know as much as we can, we should not just take the news on face value, we should investigate the articles we are interested in. This has gotten a lot easier over the years with the plethora of search engines out there. There is an organization known as the Citizens Against Government Waste and they try and keep an eye on bills being submitted in the federal government and according to them there are tons of pork in the new bills. Pork is money earmarked for political purposes which doesn’t do the citizens any good and just increases the debt to the gain of political allies, companies and such. Citizens of all political parties should be against this kind of thing. In 2020 there was an increase in what is known as Earmarks. Earmarks circumvent the allocation process and direct funds to a person or entity. In 2021 so far, the earmarks have increased to almost 75 percent from 2017 and the year still had two months to go. Another big problem with the government is people who have financial interests connected to other countries. Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of this. Many have connections with Chinese companies worth a lot of money and do not want to endanger them and many times this is in direct conflict with decisions which should be made which are based on what is best for our country and citizens. This type of corruption not only costs us billions of dollars every year, but can put our country in danger. In order to protect this country a leader must be respected by the rest of the world. Notice I didn’t say liked, because that is different. I am talking about a leader who everyone knows will do what he says. Many may not like to hear this, but we are sorely lacking in this area today. Looking weak in dealing with other countries just puts the world In more danger and we can see that happening today. When I was young there didn’t seem to be any problem with drinking water. Today there are a lot of places in this country where the water is not fit to drink. How could our local leaders and even our federal ones let this happen? This is another one of those things that contributes to the notion politicians do not really care about us. This is such a fundamental issue; it should have been on the top of the list of things to prevent. I know of one place which has so much contamination in the water it can be lit on fire and burn. How do things get this out of hand? The United States is in a mess right now and has to get control on so many different things. We have to make sure our military keeps ahead of China and Russia and not allow them to get weapons we can’t counter. We have to get a hold of our national debt and cut the pork out of out budgets. If we are so worried about climate change, we need to force the entire world to take part in the agreements to fight it, and we need to elect people who will abide by their word so we are not trampled by the other nations.
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