The government is famous for accomplishing mediocre results at three times the cost of the private sector. I don't know why this has to be repeated over and over again as though it's news.

Bureaucracies do not deliver innovation. Bureaucracies are not efficient. The main function of a bureaucracy is to preserve the power and existence of the bureaucracy. There have been nations ruled entirely by government bureaucracies. The results should not be news to anyone either.

You'd think we'd learn something from watching how the DoD and NASA do business.

The Department of Defense should not need any examples from me of spending billions inefficiently.

Do you think NASA's bureaucracy has improved since the 1960s?

Robert Zubrin wrote an article in Space News last week. An excerpt:

...Interviewed on PBS TV Aug. 14 about his committee's conclusions, Mr. Augustine said the reason why NASA cannot be expected to achieve comparable feats to those of the Apollo era, is because at that time, the space agency commanded 4 percent of the federal budget, while today it gets less than I percent. These figures seem compelling but are actually misleading.

Put in today's dollars, NASA received a total of $230 billion between 1961 and 1973, for an average of $18 billion per year. NASA's budget this year is $18 billion, and the political establishment seems willing to provide about this level of support for the foreseeable future.

Between 1961 and 1973, with this same funding rate, NASA built and flew the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner and Pioneer programs, and performed all the development needed for the Viking and Voyager missions as well.

In addition, over the same span, the agency developed hydrogen/oxygen rocket engines, multistage heavy-lift launch vehicles, in-space life support , spacesuits, deep space navigation and communication, nuclear rocket engines, space nuclear reactors and radioisotope thermoelectric generators, lunar rovers, soft planetary landing techniques, re-entry technology, orbital rendezvous technology--indeed the entire bag of tricks we have used ever since to do everything we do in space--and built the Cape Canaveral launch complex, the Deep Space tracking network, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Johnson Space Center, and all of the rest of the ground infrastructure supporting the space program as well.

And again, all of this was done on the same average budget as NASA has today. NASA's current budget is a smaller percent of the total federal budget than it was in the 1960s because the country was much poorer then, and had less money to spend overall. But the relative poverty of the nation in the past was hardly an advantage for the Apollo era. No, what the space program had then which it lacks today is not money, but bold, competent and responsible leadership.

You'd think we'd also learn from public education, which is currently delivering worse results than schools many years ago that were spending a third the money per student.

We built the greatest technological society on the planet with those schools. Many of the old men I knew in the space program grew up in one-room schoolhouses. Long before there even was a Federal Department of Education.

I remember the schools I went to as a child. Remember when you would show up at your desk on the first day of school, and open it up to see your brand new crayons, paper, ruler, scissors, and everything else you'd need? Nowadays as parents we have to buy all this ourselves, and our schools ask for additional donations of things like paper towels and toilet paper(!). Handouts here have been printed out on the back of old letterhead donated by local companies. Teachers often have to draw on their own pay for the needs of the classroom. And this is Silicon Valley, not some rural district.

Remember when schools had their own kitchens and food staff, instead of getting box meals trucked in, packaged and heated like airplane food? Remember when a school nursing staff was standard? Remember when it wasn't considered a luxury to have art programs, theater programs, shop classes, band AND orchestra? Remember when buses were provided for almost everyone who lived more than an easy walk from school? I do, and I didn't live in rich school districts. One would probably qualify as "inner city" today.

In constant dollars, costs per student have tripled since 1965. To add insult to injury, teacher salaries, in constant dollars, have barely gone up at all. Educational results speak for themselves. Why? Bureaucracy.

Tell you what. The government has a spectacular opportunity to show it can actually deliver on health care. Tell them to bring Medicare into balance without reducing services to NHS levels, or taxing us into oblivion. I'll wait.