Space Shuttle: Actions Needed to Better Position NASA to Sustain Its Workforce Through Retirement

GAO was asked to identify the progress of NASA's efforts to develop a strategy for sustaining the space shuttle workforce through retirement and factors that may have impeded these efforts. In 2005, GAO found that the space shuttle program had made limited progress toward developing a detailed long-term strategy and several factors, such as a near-term focus on returning the shuttle to flight, hampered the program's ability to develop that strategy. GAO recommended that NASA take steps to better position the agency to sustain a critically skilled space shuttle workforce through retirement by implementing an approach for identifying the program's future workforce needs that takes in to account various future scenarios the program could face. Further GAO recommended that NASA should use the information gained to develop strategies for meeting the needs of potential future scenarios. NASA concurred with GAO's recommendation and has addressed it through its internal processes that govern development of the President's Budget request and supporting Congressional Justification materials. Through its Strategic Planning Guidance, which governs NASA's budgeting process, the agency looks at multiple programming options for allocation of resources to achieve its goals, which are based in potential scenarios that may occur and how the Agency would budget for these scenarios. The NASA FY2009 SPG was released on February 21, 2007, and emphasized that in achieving its goals, NASA would need to complete a re-establishment of workforce capabilities. Each NASA Center was required to evaluate measures of workforce capability to assess the overall capability of the total workforce and other characteristics such as the ability to align the workforce to a range of future work. Centers were directed, using guidance from the FY2009 SPG, to plan against a baseline of work, and programmatic variations on that baseline as prescribed by the various Agency mission organizations. To implement the requirements of the SPG at the mission directorate level, specific lower level guidance was developed jointly between the Space Operations Mission Directorate and the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. This guidance was intended to establish a baseline approach for retiring the space shuttle and transitioning to the Constellation program that was supplemented by several planning options for doing so. To provide a basis for the development of workforce inputs for NASA's strategic plan, NASA developed a workforce transition strategy that was released in March 2008. This strategy, which is intended to change as the maturity of the data inputs increases, includes high and low projections of future contractor workforce levels as well as projects of civil servant levels at NASA centers affected by the transition. These projections were based on several variables, including contractor information, facilities needs, and program requirements, some of which are well defined and others that are less defined. According to NASA, this approach was chosen to (1) allow the programs to better assess and respond to workload change; (2) identify risks associated with having too many, too few or incomplete resources for certain scenarios; and (3) better determine what, if any resource changes would be warranted to respond to plan dynamics. Consistent with our recommendation, the intended outcome of such an approach is to allow for less "crisis planning" and a more gradual development and implementation of workforce solutions.