I'm not sure if anyone reads the book descriptions I write and post on the blog (I know that last one was really long...) but some of the political analysis books talk about discrepencies between what the president or congress wants, what they fund, and what the bureaucracy actually does. There was a great space example in the news today, so I thought I'd share:
(Florida Today) January 25, 2010
Five years ago, Congress ordered NASA to come up with a way to spot, catalog and track asteroids big enough to cause widespread regional damage -- meaning a space rock big enough to level a major city. As with so many other orders from Washington, Congress provided no money for the expanded asteroid hunt. NASA was to divert funds from other projects to field a system by 2010 and use it to document 90 percent of all near-Earth objects wider than 140 meters across. NASA hasn't done it.
Just thought it was nice to have some indication that the reading I'm doing has a connection to the real world. (Even if the implication is that the government doesn't work smoothly the way we'd like...)
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