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"NASA can improve its management of the JPL contract:
- NASA's overall assessment of contractor performance may have been overstated because the Agency's performance evaluations for fiscal year (FY) 2007 were incomplete or did not otherwise comply with its guidance.
- The contractor's poor performance on a large, significant project was offset in NASA's assessment by higher performance on smaller projects because the Agency did not use proportional weighting in its evaluations.
- NASA's award of $16 million in fees and 27 months of contract term extensions, value at $3.375 billion, were unsupported because the Agency's performance evaluation factors did not include an assessment of required cost control measures.
- NASA does not have assurance that the existing contract still meets its needs or provides the best value for the taxpayer because the Agency did not fully comply with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requirements for a 5-year comprehensive review of the use and need for the FFRDC.
- NASA's use of a single CPAF contract for all aspects of the FFRDC creates a significant administrative and management burden for the Agency that is unnecessary given that there is a basis for the contracting officer to establish fair and reasonable prices for routine operations and maintenance of the facility."
JPL has world class engineers but JPL management needs to be replaced. What the JPL workers send to their management is NOT what goes to NASA HQ. The ridiculous number of reviews that MSL has had for overruns is a reason to cancel it. JPL insiders have already said they expect to request an augmentation in the next couple months. SMAP is another mission with management game playing.
The worst part of this contract with NASA is Elachi gets to sit on the NASA Management Councils yet APL doesn't. APL is an URDC but doesn't get the benefits JPL does. In fact APL has to report to a center programs and doesn't have the direct link that JPL does to HQ.
Bottom line - the JPL management needs to be replaced. They constantly manipulate the truth of their projects to NASA HQ to piecemeal funding to their Lab for the broken projects. However, NASA HQ are partially to blame for allowing JPL to continuously get away with this behavior.