Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Shutdown

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

In a government shutdown seemingly without end, we bring you two stories from individuals directly impacted by the crisis. NASA scientist and union representative Lee Stone discusses the missed paychecks, loss of science, and lasting negative consequences to the public sector scientific workforce. Rob Hoyt, CEO of Tethers Unlimited, a small business in Washington state that was forced to lay off 20% of its workforce due to unpaid NASA contracts, describes the impact on contractors that may never see repayment or reimbursements. The Planetary Society has a petition to end the shutdown. More resources to explore this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-33.html\Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, welcome back to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Yes, we're a little bit late this month, but very happy to be joining you with this monthly look at space policy and space advocacy. And for that, we are joined, as always, by the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome, Casey. Matt, as always, I am happy to be here, unfurloughed and present as part of a nonprofit organization, obviously. Yes, and I guess for once that gives us a bit of an advantage over many of the other folks that we're going to be talking about today. Yeah. Our main focus

is going to be the ongoing government shutdown. Now we are speaking the day before this program becomes available, but I think it's a safe bet that the shutdown sadly will still be going on if people catch this program early on. Indeed. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way out at the moment. And even if it does, the government does reopen tomorrow, the impacts are felt one way or another. This is day 27 of the government's partial government shutdown, which impacts all of NASA. That's a long time. This is the longest shutdown of NASA in government history. And it is not a good thing for either

the space program, the employees who work there, and the thousands of contractors who depend on NASA to make their payroll. So we're going to get into this, and we have a couple of very special guests who are right at the center of the shutdown and the damage that it is doing, whom Casey will be introducing in a moment. But we have to start with our usual appeal. You will hear in moments why being a member of the Planetary Society is maybe more important than ever because of the efforts that Casey and the rest of our space policy and advocacy staff have underway. You can become part of this. You can join us at planetary.org membership and stand behind everything the society does, including this show and the weekly version of Planetary Radio,

but all of our projects, making it possible for everything that Casey is up to. Planetary.org slash membership open to people around the world, but our fellow U.S. citizens may have special reason for becoming involved right now. Casey, I got some email from you just this morning that is very relevant to our topic today. Yes, we are asking our members, our supporters, anyone who is a fan of space exploration to basically say enough is enough and let's open NASA. Let's let their hardworking scientists and engineers and support staff get back to work doing some of the most critical exploration efforts in the world. Right now, they're sitting idle. We'll talk about that in a second. But let's open NASA. And frankly, let's open the rest of government. Political debates can continue while government works. But right now,

hundreds of thousands of people are suffering across the country, missing paychecks. They're being demoralized. People are looking at places like NASA and saying, why should I ever work at NASA if I can't expect even the most basic financial security from the federal government? This is not how you run a space program. It's time to tell members of Congress. It's time to tell the White House. We have an online petition that'll do both of those for you. You just put in your address. We have a message pre-written, but we encourage you to add your own flair to it to make it stand out.

And that's at planetary.org right now. It's on the front page. Or you can go to planetary.org slash space advocate and see the link there. So it's very easy to fill out. I strongly recommend you do that. Make your voice heard on this. Because again, this is not how you run a space program. This is not how anyone would run a space program. And frankly, it's not how anyone does run a space program, except here in the United States.

We need to speak up about this. No matter what your politics are on the immigration debate that is driving this, NASA has nothing to do with that. And frankly, neither does all of the other government scientists who are out of work right now. Casey, do you want to give us a little bit more background about the shutdown? Now, many of our listeners have heard a lot of this, but we're coming at it from a particular angle, but maybe some just general, an overview of what this means. Yeah.

Let's talk about where we are and why this happened. So again, we're on day 27 of this shutdown. We're almost at a month. We're in the fourth week. The government shutdown happened at the very end of the previous Congress. In December, right before Christmas, you had still Republican majorities in the Senate and the House. You had still Republican majorities in the Senate and the House. You had an election, but the new Congress didn't convene until January. The Senate moved to pass what was called a continuing resolution, a CR, that would have funded NASA and about a dozen other federal agencies for about two months in order to keep the conversation going about how to fund border security issues, which is kind of the core political debate that's happening right now between the president, Congress, and particularly Democrats in Congress. The Senate passed this unanimously. The president decided after that had been passed that it didn't fund the border wall priority enough, even though it was a temporary

funding measure, and said that he would veto any similar resolution coming out of the House. And so one of the very final acts of the Republican controlled House under Paul Ryan was to pass a hastily thrown together budget, a CR, basically another continuing resolution, but with almost $6 billion specifically earmarked for a wall, and billions of other dollars for emergency relief and various states from the natural disasters that we've had, basically tacking on $15 billion of extra spending. The Democrats in the Senate have an ability to filibuster such things. And so it was a non-starter. The government shut down right before Christmas. The shutdown has then continued. So obviously,

Democrats came in and have taken over power in the House of Representatives and now run that part of government starting on January 3rd. Republicans still run the Senate, and obviously, President Trump is still the president. There has not been, let's say, a very healthy discussion going on. There has been very little actual negotiations happening. But in the meantime, the functional consequence is that we have a good portion, about 800,000 federal employees from about a dozen different agencies. Again, these include the Environmental Protection Agency. This includes NOAA. Obviously, this includes NASA. It includes the Interior Department, National Parks. They're furloughed. What that means is that they're sent home. The government does not have the authority granted

by Congress to spend money on its basic operations. Now, this is not the entire government. We're in a partial government shutdown. The most politically supported agencies were funded back in, I believe, October. This includes the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and Veterans Affairs. They all have received their full year funding. So they're operating normally. However, every other part of government that's not mandatory spending and effectively Social Security, Medicare is shut down. Employees are not actually just told to go home. They're legally prevented from working because they're not getting paid for this.

You have what's called accepted employees. A lot of people in the press use essential, but the actual term is accepted, that are, because of the specific nature of their job, their absence from their job would lead to the destruction or compromising of safety of people or government assets. So, for example, with NASA, the ISS mission control is still fully staffed and in operation. However, those people staffing the ISS right now are still not getting paid. They're functionally working for free during this period. About 420,000 government employees are showing up to work without pay right now. And then more broadly, we're looking at contractors who provide all sorts of services to the federal government. We've talked about them before in the context of NASA. Contractors provide tons of services for

NASA. They rely on NASA contracts. They rely on federal contracts. They are not getting paid either. And unlike federal employees that have a numerous amount of protections and legal frameworks supporting them. Federal employees are guaranteed now to be paid as soon as the shutdown ends. So they will receive back pay, but we don't know when. Contractors have no such guarantee. There are hundreds of thousands more contractors. Some estimates are around a half a million contractors around the country impacted by the shutdown right now. And so we are basically looking at, again, the terms of the longest partial government shutdown in history, 800,000 federal employees working or sent home with no pay. We're looking at half a million contractors who may never be paid for this period, and an incredible amount of disruption, both programmatically,

not to mention the fear and stress and suffering of these individuals who are struggling to pay their rents, pay their mortgages, pay childcare, pay healthcare during this period. As I like to say, celestial mechanics do not stop due to political divisions in this country, right? There are missions, for example, Mars 2020, which needs to launch in 2020 in order to get that home and transfer window for Mars that you have to keep pace on or else you could miss these launch opportunities. Commercial crew is depending on test launches that cannot be licensed now because the FAA is shut down.

You have IRS, you have all these other aspects of government agencies that have limited amounts of resources, if any resources. And as time continues, the impacts are going to continue piling up and these impacts are not reversible necessarily. I had an interview set up with a scientist who is partially funded by NASA. He couldn't do it. He couldn't even get back to me. He couldn't send me email.

He couldn't call me because that would have been work-related. He couldn't therefore even tell me, you know what? I can't make that interview that we had set up. So there is one tiny ramification. In the month and a half since we last spoke, Casey, of course, the space exploration has not stood still. There, in fact, have been tremendous accomplishments by US teams. I'm thinking of OSIRIS-REx and New Horizons and many others. How are these ongoing missions affected or how might they be affected if this continues?

This is where the role of contractors comes in. And this is where some of the subtleties arise. Places like New Horizon, they're managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA. The way that contractors work, JPL, we should emphasize, is like this too. JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA. So NASA will pay these contracts in advance. And so many of these institutions have a pot of money that has already been paid by NASA before NASA shut down. And they're able to continue to draw from that and continue to work as long as their employees are not federal employees. And at JPL, there's actually only a few hundred, a few dozen, I should say, federal employees at JPL. The rest are actually technically employees

of Caltech. They're able to continue working. OSIRIS-REx is managed by University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin for NASA. So they have pots of money they're able to draw from. NASA scientists on those missions are absent right now. They're not allowed to work. There may be some exceptions if those scientists' presence are critical to the safe operation of these assets. But otherwise, we have pots of money sitting around. Now, those pots of money won't last forever. JPL was just saying the other day that in a few weeks, they're going to have to start furloughing their own staff too as their contract money runs out. Smaller contractors who don't have as big of reserves or don't have as big of pots of money to draw from are already laying off people as we're going

to hear about very soon. And so ironically, despite the fact that we're seeing these incredible feats of exploration with OSIRIS-REx and New Horizons, that is from work that NASA has already paid into, right? So the longer this goes on, the more and more consequences we're going to see. But ultimately, the safety of these spacecraft will never be compromised because NASA will allow its employees to work for free, but allow them to do these jobs in order to preserve the government investment in that hardware. Same for the International Space Station.

And as we know, these scientists and engineers are so dedicated to their missions. I doubt that any of them will forego any of their responsibilities to keep these spacecraft safe. So there's one tiny bit of, I don't even know if you can call it good news. spacecraft safe. So there's one tiny bit of, I don't even know if you can call it good news. Casey, you had the excellent foresight to realize that people just listening to us talk about this would maybe not be as powerful as hearing some of the people who are more directly affected by it. And if you're ready, maybe we could hear from the first of them. Would you like to introduce your first guest? Of course, yeah.

And this is something that's really, I mean, it's just personally important, but I think it's critical as a space advocate and frankly, as a citizen or any interested party here. Again, this shutdown isn't some abstraction, right? This isn't something that we are just talking about like, oh, NASA can't do stuff. Like there's real consequences to the people who enable space exploration to happen. NASA is built on the hard work and talent of its incredibly skilled workforce. And I'm not just talking about government employees. I'm talking about the contractors.

We'll talk to them too. In order to talk about this, I actually reached out and found one of the representatives of the Federal Employees Union that represents a lot of NASA employees in headquarters at Marshall Space Flight Center across the government, in addition to other government scientists across the country. His name is Lee Stone. In addition to his work as a professional scientist, he is also the vice president of the Western Federal Area for the International Federation of Professional Technical Engineers. So it's an employee's union. So he is in a really unique position to not only be a scientist and have that personal experience with the government, but also be hearing from his union members, these other federal scientists, engineers,

and technical specialists across the government who are currently trying to manage this unexpected shutdown. And so let's, why don't we hear from Lee and hear about the types of situations that government scientists and engineers are dealing with during this extended shutdown. Very good. We'll roll that now. This is Casey's conversation with Lee Stone, recorded just a few minutes before Casey and I began to speak today. Thank you very much for joining us today in the Space Policy Edition podcast. Thank you for having me.

Maybe just real quickly, can you just introduce yourself and the role that you're representing here today and how it relates to the federal employees and scientists that we're going to be talking about? I'm the vice president of the Western Federal Area for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. We're a labor union that represents private, public, and federal sector workers. We represent about 10,000 federal workers, predominantly highly skilled technical workers across a number of agencies, primarily NASA, EPA, and NOAA. And so that is my role today because we represent the folks at those agencies who are locked out at the moment and unable to do their science. They're locked out because we're in a partial government shutdown. And as we record this, I believe we're in day 27, which is far beyond the longest in the past, any shutdown that we've experienced in the U.S.

Maybe just to start out with, what are you hearing from your members, from the federal scientists and government employees that are not being allowed to work right now? I would describe this as a slow boil. right now? I would describe this as a slow boil. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time we have been subjected to a shutdown. They've been occurring, there's three of them this year, although two of them were very brief, but there've been a number of them that have lasted a little while. This one is different. What I'm hearing is that, you know, initially folks were optimistic that they would get back quickly. There was irritation, concern about immediate things that they couldn't do, meetings that they couldn't attend, immediate plans that were being scuttled. But of course, the optimism was that, well, we'll get back to

work quickly and I'll be able to do something to repair this. Obviously, you can't attend a meeting that's over and you can't do something that was very tightly scheduled. But a lot of the things people were hopeful about getting back to work quickly and fixing any harm that might have occurred. But now as we're going into week four and there's really no end in sight, everybody is beginning to understand that this one is different. This one is much more harmful. The impacts are beginning to be felt as serious long-term damage to their activities. So we're looking at tens of thousands of employees furloughed, which means that they're sent home without pay. We just missed, I believe, the first paycheck was

January 11th was supposed to be received. Obviously, that didn't happen. What type of financial stress are employees and federal scientists feeling right now? There's a wide range of financial impacts, and they vary tremendously across different cohorts of employees. Obviously, the ones who are affected the most severely are our young people. Because if you're young, you just started working, you have your student loans to pay off, you have an apartment, you're trying to get yourself financially settled, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley and other places where everything is very expensive and you don't have any financial reserves. I would also include in that young families, folks who are having children and trying to embrace more financial

responsibility of raising a family. Those folks early in their careers are facing absolutely catastrophic challenges right now where rent is due and eviction notices are going to be posted. Families don't necessarily have savings to pay for urgent family needs, you know, if there's an illness or something like that in the family. So while there are folks who have been working for decades and they may have more reserve and be able to withstand the loss of a paycheck or two or maybe even three, our young folks are really catastrophically being impacted, as well as our lower wage employees, the folks who are support staff for a lot of what we do. They may not have the glamorous jobs of the PhDs, but they are living

paycheck to paycheck. And those folks, even if they're not scientists, they support the work that scientists do. And they also are facing immediate catastrophic financial impacts because catastrophic financial impacts because their landlord isn't a charity, their bank isn't a charity. While some places have accorded some largesse, and we're very grateful for the outpouring of support that some institutions have been able to provide, many of them are actually facing serious financial harm. And then even if they're paid in arrears, you can't feed your kid a meal today with a paycheck you get two, three weeks from now. Your credit could be catastrophically harmed for years. This is very, very bad. And it's a serious challenge for our young people. So in addition to the struggling aspect and just like the personal implications

that people are trying to get through their day to day living. You know, you represent not just NASA scientists, but scientists across the federal government. What impacts are you hearing already broadly to science? Are you concerned about broad scientific returns or impacts to the efficiency or ability of the workforce more broadly? Yes. As you might imagine, government science, it tends to be bigger science than might be done at a university or a college. And it often involves collaboration across multiple institutions, private sector engineers who are building special instruments or special devices, scientists at universities and their students, as well as in-house scientists, all collaborating in a complicated plan that has very complex logistics and may last for years.

You can imagine if you're flying a satellite to do an experiment or if you're flying an airplane observatory to do an experiment, these things can't be recouped. If you had planned data collection and your airborne observatory is grounded, then you can't collect the data. And that has huge repercussions if it was a celestial event that isn't recurring, or if it is something that is timed according to a season and you can't reschedule it for next year because there are other things happening with that observatory. And so you can't just move it down the road because the future flights and future activities

are already booked as well. And so these things get lost. And if they involve critical experiments that have been planned for years, they're at the very least seriously compromised where, you know, when you're trying to go through peer review, you have to explain why there's missing data that may be crucial for interpretation. And at worst, it ends up being canceled because the data actually were instrumental in the

interpretation. And then it has impacts on all of our folks throughout the private sector who are building these things, who are, and the academic partners who may have students whose thesis depended on the data that was collected. And so this is disruptive in a very serious way. Science is a complicated, complex thing. It is not resilient to this sort of random perturbations of interruption in the flow of data collection, data analysis, and interpretation. So it is very disruptive. And now that we're going into our fourth week now, it is really beginning to have a toll on many projects across many agencies. And some of this science isn't only research and discovery or exploration science that NASA might

be leading. But a lot of this science that federal scientists do is operational in nature, like the EPA, which is always collecting data on environmental safety and things of that nature. And if they're unable to analyze data or collect data, then what the people are deprived of then isn't research discovery, but they're deprived of the scientific data that's necessary for their health and well-being. It's a good day for polluters right now because the enforcement of our pollution laws is completely porous. As I said, a lot of the data collection has been disrupted and the data analysis labs at EPA are shut down, so they're unable to analyze these data. The American people count on them to provide scientific data to enforce our environmental laws and to

protect our society from polluters. So it sounds like from what you're telling me, the way I was kind of thinking of this, it's not necessarily a linear relationship between the length of the shutdown and the impact. It almost sounds like it's either compounding or geometrical. Would you agree with that? The longer this goes on, the worse the impacts are going to be in the long term in particular for science, not just the workforce? Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to get into the esoterica of nonlinear versus linear problems, but you're exactly correct. There's a certain amount of luck involved in what was actually scheduled for January, right? So there's some bad luck involved in those observations and those things that may disappear because of the shutdown. But your point is exactly valid, which is

if the interpretation of a scientific experiment involves looking at a matrix of multidimensional data collection that occurred over multiple time points, and you're looking at a time course and you're making an interpretation based on a data sampling process that was planned out extraordinarily carefully by the scientists involved, and went through peer review to be able to be funded to do this work. And then you suddenly randomly pluck out pieces of that complex array of data that you were going to use to make your interpretations. It isn't like if you lose 5% of the data, you lose 5% of your interpretation. As you're pointing out, it's not linear. If you pick the wrong 5%, you could lose everything, or you could lose half of it, or you could lose some other much larger component of your ability to interpret the data by the loss of a small amount of data. It depends on what those data are that you lose and what the experimental design is, but it is not a healthy thing to start plucking data points away from a carefully designed experiment. You must be hearing a lot of frustration from your colleagues

and other employees, and particularly young people. Are you worried about the long-term ability for the federal government agencies to recruit top scientists or to bring people into this field to really be able to provide good talent to the government? The point you raise now is probably the single most serious adverse impact that we're facing today. While it is extraordinarily sad that we're losing data and we're losing the ability to present the data at meetings. And some of these, as I said, may be irreversible, but those are individual projects that are lost. What we may very well be losing is a generation of scientists. All of the people who are hired in December and we're going to come on board in January are all waiting. They're on hold.

They can't get their jobs. They can't start their careers. How long are they going to wait? The ones who are fortunate enough to have started prior to that, they're not getting paid. Are they losing their apartment? Is their experiment that they were going, you know, some data collection regime that was going to happen last week gone, gone forever? And are they going to have to try to rethink what they need to do to get their work done? All of this is extraordinarily damaging to our ability to recruit these extraordinarily talented people. They're beginning to second guess their choice of either coming to or considering federal employment. I just heard actually yesterday that NASA's postdoctoral fellowship program is running out of money and they're going to stop paying their postdocs. These folks are students. These folks don't have any financial resources to fall back on unless they have wealthy parents. The really catastrophic outcome here is an entire

generation of the best and the brightest young scientists that the government has managed to recruit and pry away from more lucrative careers in the private sector or even academia. We've managed to pry them away because there's something extraordinarily exciting about working on something so big as federal science, where you know that you're working on something that's much bigger than yourself, whether you're doing space exploration or whether you're modeling climate change or you're doing something very, very important for the future of society and the planet, that can pry you away from money and the lucrative offer that the private sector has out there. offer that the private sector has out there. But if when you arrive at the government, it was all a farce. You don't have any stability to get that work done. Your funding is pried away

from you arbitrarily and capriciously like it has been. You're worried about making ends meet and feeding yourself. And if you have children, it's even more stressful and overwhelming. eating yourself, and if you have children, it's even more stressful and overwhelming. This is going to leave a bad taste in their mouth that may last a lifetime. And if those folks leave and they don't come back and the government is no longer able to recruit its fair share of the best and the brightest of the young generation that this country is producing, then that will be a catastrophic long-term impact on the government, and it will harm society for decades to come. I can't really imagine a better way to kind of end this discussion. I mean, I think that's really the core of this. And just to be clear, I'll just give you the opportunity to say from the union

perspective, what do you want here? You're not asking for anything but to return to work. Is that effectively correct? Well, first and foremost, while there are complicated political questions that have nothing to do with science and the scientists we represent have a wide array of political viewpoints about how to handle border security, for example. My union is silent on this issue because it has nothing to do with whether or not the government is open or closed. We could open the government today and then have Congress and the president debate the future of border security as a completely independent thing. It is absolutely outrageous and unconscionable that all of these folks are being held hostage to a political question where, regardless of how important that question is, it has nothing to do with the science that needs to

be done and the investments in our future that need to be done. What my union is asking for is two things. In the short term, in the immediate term, just reopen the government immediately. The House has passed a bill to do so. The Senate should pass that bill. It passed the same bill in December unanimously, and it should just send that to the president's desk. And if he doesn't sign it, they should just override it. Then they can argue the other issues that are on the table and where there's significant disagreement across the spectrum. They can solve that problem separately. And then in the long term, what we absolutely positively need in order to make this country stronger and have more effective long-term investment in its intellectual infrastructure

and its technical capabilities is we need to return to regular order in our appropriations process. The shutdown just represents an extreme version of the dysfunction of our appropriations process that we've been suffering now for more than a decade. When we have continuing resolution after continuing resolution, that may work for the Social Security Administration that pretty much does the same thing next year that it did last year. But if you're a scientific entity, if you're doing something like what NASA does or what EPA does, you're facing different questions every year, and you need different funding and different programs. When you just get these continuing resolutions that don't recognize your ability or your need to prepare yourself for the new problem that you're facing in this year or the following year or the year after that, you can't plan efficiently. Money gets wasted that way.

Things get canceled that way. Things get replanned and replanned, and then you have to plan them again. All of that inefficiency is costing us our cutting edge in the world. And when we have countries like China that are investing in their future and are eager to take over the role as the lead technology and science country in the world, nation in the world, they're certainly chasing us and they intend to surpass us. Indeed, there's enormous irony in NASA's shutdown, but China's landing on the far side of the moon. That did not escape the notice of most of the scientists that we represent. And it represents a metaphor for the potential future here.

Do we want to be the ones doing things for the first time here as a nation, as we have done for decades? Or do we want to relinquish that to China and other nations that are eager to supplant us? And if we don't get our act together and have more effective, intelligent ways of sustaining funding for our long-term strategic investments, if we continue to treat them tactically every year as just some small piece of a political argument as opposed to a governance strategy, we will lose that cutting edge. And then our children will end up going elsewhere to get their educations in the future if we're lose that cutting edge. And then our children will end up going

elsewhere to get their educations in the future if we're not that cutting edge, because the opportunities may be elsewhere. That's part of a unconscionable abdication of the critical role of our government, which is to do the absolute best that they can to plan the future for our children and for our children's children. Lee Stone, I want to thank you for joining us today, and I wish you the best in getting back to work as quickly as possible. Thank you very much. So that's a scientist, Lee Stone, speaking in his capacity as a union leader with Casey Dreyer. And Casey is back on the line with us. Casey? Again, I just want to emphasize what Lee said. And this is one of my profound

worries here is that the long-term impact to the quality of the workforce. And again, when you do public service, because this is fundamentally when you work for the government, you are able to pursue long-term projects that are more ambitious. They may have less of a direct consumer connection, right? You have R&D in the private sector, but it tends to be directed R&D. The whole point and our whole 20th century revolution in electronics, quality of life, health, electronics, quality of life, health, has come from fundamental research in basic science that has led to completely unexpected benefits. And that is the fundamental role of the public sector. This is why you have public investment in science and research. And in order to really

succeed in that, you need to attract good people. You need to attract the smartest people who want to work for a big system like that. And the more you have disruption and arbitrary disruption and unpredictable disruption, something that you heard from Leo is this isn't just being in shutdowns. Things like continuing resolutions, these stopgap funding measures that temporarily extend past authorization for spending but delay new authorization, those are very disruptive too because those are basically just holding patterns. And you have so much of a time during a fiscal year, months at a time, in these holding patterns unable to start big new projects because Congress is

unable and the White House is unable to find some agreement or long-term stability in spending. And again, generally completely unrelated to what NASA is doing or many other federal agencies are doing in terms of science, right? They just get caught up in this. I want the best and the brightest to be able to work for NASA and do a great job because that is how the taxpayer gets the best bang for their buck out of investing in things like NASA. I want people to be excited to pursue these projects and to feel comfortable. And I really do believe the least we can do as a nation, if we're asking hardworking men and women of NASA and other federal agencies to do unprecedented things, the least we can do is pay their damn paychecks on time.

Right. We need to really think about these long term consequences if we're going to remain competitive in the world. And something that I thought about when I was talking to Lee, I will post this on the show notes. There was a political cartoon going around Weibo, the Chinese social network today. It's a picture of a drawing of a panda in a spacesuit looking at a big Long March rocket. The translation in Mandarin is something along the United States, no one else shuts down arbitrarily funding to their basic R&D when there's a political debate, particularly an unrelated political debate. So the U.S. is stymied right now. We are having a huge, highly skilled workforce sitting idle for effectively no reason. This impact is broader than just the government employees. This impact hits the thousands of

contractors, these small businesses, these private businesses who work with NASA to provide them services, research, skilled labor, technical capabilities. They do not have, again, the same types of legal protections that federal employees do. And they are suffering too. And this is why we have our next guest. His name is Dr. Robert Hoyt. He is the CEO of Tethers Unlimited. It is a small aerospace company in Bothell, Washington, right? Just outside of Seattle, fewer than 100 employees, but highly skilled employees. They have contracts with NASA, the Defense Department and commercial companies. You'll hear about that.

But they just had to lay off 20% of their workforce because NASA can no longer pay their contracts. And so imagine being a small business owner who is busting their ass doing incredible work for exciting new technologies and development, for servicing and creating these highly skilled jobs, for these well-paying jobs all over the country. This isn't just Tethers Unlimited.

And then suddenly your contract with the government that if you broke, you would be in legal trouble for is suddenly not serviced. How can they remain viable financially? And as he will go into, they made a very hard decision. They had to lay off a chunk of their workforce related to these contracts. Those people aren't necessarily going to come back. They'll go out into the world. Who knows, right? And imagine the families of those people getting laid off all of a sudden right around Christmas because the government

shut down for this entirely unrelated reason. So why don't we hear from Rob Hoyt about trying to manage this uncertainty and what it's like to be a contractor during a government shutdown right now? Absolutely. Here is Robert Hoyt, the CEO of Tethers Unlimited. Rob, I want to thank you for joining us today. Glad to talk with you. Can you give us a broad overview of your company, Tethers Unlimited, where you're based, what you're trying to do, and some of those things you've achieved in the past? Sure. Tethers Unlimited develops advanced technologies for space and defense missions with a strong emphasis on space. Roughly half of our business is developing and providing component technologies for very small satellites, things like radios and thrusters and gimbals. And most of our customers there are in the commercial sector.

We provide those components to a variety of companies that assemble satellites for government and commercial missions. The other half of our company is mainly performing research and development in support of NASA and DOD programs focused on creating new capabilities for in-space manufacturing and assembly of space systems. So we're trying to develop the capability to build the next generation of space systems and do a lot of that work in space. We cover a pretty broad area. And fortunately, at this point, we have both commercial and government customers.

And can you talk just broadly about the company itself, just to emphasize you're a private company, right? And how long have you been around and roughly how many employees do you have at any given time? Yeah, we're a small business. We've actually been in business for 25 years now. And we've grown organically. We haven't taken in any venture capital or significant outside investment.

Our growth has all been through winning and performing contracts and developing products and getting them on the market. So we're a little bit unusual in the space sector. At this point, we have, I think, 56 people on our staff, vast majority of those being engineers, mechanical, electrical, aerospace, and software engineers. These jobs, most of the jobs at your company, these are pretty upper middle class, well-paying, highly skilled jobs? Yeah, most of our employees are engineers with at least a bachelor, several PhDs and a number of master's degrees. So they're well-educated and experienced and pretty, I think, pretty good paying jobs. Kind of broadly, can you talk about as a small company working with just not just the commercial sector, but with DOD and NASA, where do you kind of fit in? Let's talk about the concept of

contractors and the relationship you have with federal agencies. At this point, we both do direct contracting with the government. So we perform a lot of what are called small business innovation research or SBIR contracts funded by NASA companies, most of whom are performing government contracts. So we get a subcontract to do a portion of the work or provide components for their satellites or whatever else they need. So we both do direct prime contracts and subcontracts. With contracts, you compete for these. This is so people listening can understand you're competing for an idea, or you go to NASA and you say, we have this idea,

or you see a call for a need, and you're responding to that with the expertise that you have in-house. What's kind of the relationship there? It's all through competitive processes. Usually we come up with an idea of a new technology or a solution to a challenge we see in the industry. And then NASA or DARPA or the Air Force or other parts of the government periodically will have opportunities where they're looking for solutions to problems

and they put out a solicitation requesting ideas and proposals. So we will compete for that. We'll submit proposals. And when we do well, we win a contract to perform that work. So it's all through competitive processes that take quite a long time to go from the initial idea to landing the contract and getting underway. Let's talk then about the shutdown and the impacts that small businesses like you are feeling it. How does that shutdown of a federal agency of NASA, how has that impacted you as a private company working with NASA? The main challenge we have is that the government employees at NASA who are responsible for approving and processing the invoices we submit to get reimbursed for the work that we've done, those folks have been furloughed.

So they're not at their desks and they can't review and approve our invoices. So those invoices are not getting paid. We have a similar problem or challenge with some of our DARPA contracts. Although DARPA, my understanding, DARPA is still operating. Those contracts were run through the Department of Interior, and the Department of Interior is also in shutdown. So those invoices are not being processed. We've done quite a bit of work, September to December, where we have paid people salaries, we've paid for the cost of equipment and testing and other costs, but we're not being reimbursed for that work because invoices are just,

I guess, sitting on somebody's desk or sitting on somebody's computer and they can't approve them. We're a small business. We're not backed by wealthy investors or internet billionaires or anything like that. So we have to live and die on our cash flow. You know, the real challenge for us is we had a big program review on one of our programs in the middle of December, and there was a large milestone payment associated with that. And that invoice is not going to get processed until the shutdown is over. And that's a significant cash flow hit to us. So we've had to really tighten our belts to keep operating through the shutdown. Just to clarify, when you say tighten your belts, what has been the actual direct consequence to

you and your employees? Well, last Friday, we did have to reduce our staff and we had to lay off 12 of our engineers, which was pretty painful for them and for us. With that reduction in staff, I believe we can maintain our remaining staff fully employed for a month or two, at least. But if the shutdown stretches out much longer than that, it's going to have bigger impacts. This just sounds incredibly disruptive. And I just want to make completely crystal clear for anyone who's listening that this is work that you were contractually obligated to do for the government, correct? Like they, you had a deal with them that they would pay for this work and you were expecting and planning for that. Correct. And we've already done the work. We've already paid the salaries to have the work done.

So we've already incurred all those costs. And now we're seeing a indefinite delay on when we get reimbursed for those costs. How does this impact kind of your relationship with NASA in the future or the government in the future? Are you going to be rethinking as a business the value of working with government? It will make me, I think, more risk averse in dealing with the government. But the frustrating thing is we've been through this several times already. 2001, 2013, there were shutdowns that impacted us, partly because of the impacts of those shutdowns on the company. Over the past five years, we've made a real concerted effort to move more into commercial sales of products. And that, I think, was a good decision because right now, while NASA and DARPA

payments aren't being made, we are still doing work for our commercial customers and getting paid for them. And those commercial sales are going to get us through the shutdown. And the work that you do for commercial customers, is that substantially different in the type of efforts you're putting in or in terms of long-term development? Those sound more like servicing a need versus long-term research. Is that accurate? Most of it is providing components for satellites. So it's actually delivering hardware rather than performing research and development on new technologies. We do some R&D of new technologies for commercial customers, but it's more focused on delivering hardware to them.

focused on delivering hardware to them. You may have been discussing this with other business owners in this aerospace industry sphere of working with the government. Do you worry about any kind of long-term impact from this type of political instability that prevents small businesses from depending on the government to provide this sort of R&D for experimental ideas and new ideas? Oh, definitely. I know of at least a handful of other small businesses like us who are going through similar challenges, similar cash flow problems because they're not getting paid. The impacts of that last a long time. We survived the 2013 shutdown and budget cuts, but financially that set us back quite a bit and it took us several years to really recover to where we were in a decent cash position. And that has an impact on how much we can invest in developing new technologies and pursuing new business. So it definitely does have a long-term impact in terms of suppressing the growth of small businesses.

Do you think this will impact your ability to attract and retain talent over time, given the uncertainty of contracts like this? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are, we compete for employees with other companies who are, some of them are funded by internet bazillionaires who have unlimited cash. So they're much less susceptible to these kinds of disruptions than we are. So I certainly would expect some employees will look at that as a safer employment situation. Well, Rob, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our listeners who are learning about the human and small business scale impacts of

the shutdown? Well, I sure hope our government will relearn how to negotiate and compromise because these kind of disruptions, the shutdown, as well as the continuing resolutions have a real impact on our growth and our competitive in the global marketplace. There are other countries who are pursuing space technologies, military space technologies, and they don't have to deal with these government funding snafus. They're just marching forward with their plans and developing and maturing their technologies very rapidly. Our country is starting to fall behind in part because every year we get delays and disruptions due to these continuing resolutions and budget fights. So I really hope our government will start working together

and get us all operating more smoothly so we can stay competitive in the global marketplace. Rob, thank you again for joining us. And I hope the very best for Tethers Unlimited and a speedy end to the shutdown. Okay, thank you. And that's Robert Hoyt, the CEO of Tethers Unlimited and a speedy end to the shutdown. Okay, thank you. And that's Robert Hoyt, the CEO of Tethers Unlimited. I recommend that you take a look at their website.

Just Google Tethers Unlimited, and you will see the really innovative, marvelous work that this company is up to, which is now handicapped by the current partial government shutdown. And probably those effects are going to become more serious as time goes by, as you heard him tell. Casey Dreyer. Casey? It's hard for me to listen to these interviews, and I really appreciate both Lee and Rob

speaking honestly about the troubles that they're going through. You can maybe tell, Matt, that I'm a little frustrated about this situation. Yeah, a little bit. Like many of us. Many of us. And I'm not financially suffering right now. I'm not laid off. I'm not furloughed. I just believe in the mission of what these companies and NASA and the broader efforts we're trying to do here in terms of public investment in science and research. It is just the wrong way to run things here. Again, this is why we have this petition. Make your voice heard on this, because again, this should not be a difficult question. Should federal scientists be allowed

to pursue science on our behalf? There's always going to be political debates. You can negotiate them. It doesn't matter if NASA is working or not for those debates to have merit. We know now that the employees, at least the federal employees, are guaranteed their back pay. But as Lee pointed out, that doesn't help you now when your child needs food on the plate or you have to pay that health care bill now or your credit could be at risk. That doesn't matter if that money is not here on time. Low-income employees or young career employees who get paid very little, who are investing their commitment, their energies, their whole career in space science exploration, others with postdocs and so forth, they don't have savings to fall back on.

My wife was a NASA postdoc recipient back in the day. NASA postdocs are facing the fact that they'll be missing paychecks all of a sudden. I don't know what we would have done, right? We didn't have time. When you're a grad student, you get paid nothing. And then when you become a postdoc, you get paid slightly more than nothing. But you haven't had time to build up any sort of safety net. This is completely self-inflicted

and damaging to these individuals. And writ large, it's going to have these long-term impacts under the quality of the workforce that we have, the ability and the faith that we have from investment in our space program and the type of people who want to work for it. So we really want to see NASA and other federal agencies just get back to work. We have the ability for you to share that same thing now. Someone asked, why are we writing to Congress when the White House seems to be part of the negotiating table here? Well, Congress can override the White House. And we have seen by the Senate back in December having a unanimous vote in support of keeping the

government open while the debate continues for the Department of Homeland Security, which is where the immigration funding issue is. Unanimous support would suggest that you could have a veto-proof majority in both the Senate and the House if they decided to do that. So far, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has not allowed any funding bills to even be voted on in the floor in order to even be vetoed. And so Congress could end this tomorrow if they wanted to. The White House does not hold the entire debate here. And then you could debate the politics. It's worth contacting your member of Congress. It's worth sharing and understanding

that the longer this goes on, the bigger the impact is going to be on our nation's space program and other federal scientific agencies. This is an unnecessary thing, and it should stop. Because I have no doubt that we have listeners who feel that the reasons behind this shutdown that are being expressed most strongly by the White House, that they may justify this kind of attention. Our point here primarily is look at the damage that this is doing. We'll leave it at that. Casey, how do people access that petition once again? You can go to planetary.org right now. It's on our front page or planetary.org slash space advocate. That's our main policy and action page. And again, Matt, to emphasize, we are not taking a position

on immigration politics. This is, as far as I'm concerned, an utterly orthogonal issue. This has no intersection. It is unrelated. And whether or not you have the type of border security that is being debated, so to speak, right now in Congress and the White House has nothing to do with whether NASA pursues space exploration, and it shouldn't. We owe it to our nation's space program and the other hardworking federal scientists in our government to allow them to do their work on our behalf and do it well. Casey, thank you for all of this, particularly for contacting and your conversations with those two terrific guests.

We wish them and everyone else who's being affected by the shutdown the best of luck. And hopefully, Casey, by the next time that we talk, which is not far off, the first Friday in February is February 1st. Maybe we will have a much happier message for our listeners to the Space Policy Edition. In the meantime, planetary.org slash membership, become a part of this fight for space and for the men and women who devote their professional lives to it.

Casey, thanks as always. Happy to be here, Matt, and looking forward to a happier conversation next month. Let's cross our fingers. Absolutely. That's Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host and producer of Planetary Radio, and I hope you'll tune in to the weekly edition of our show. And we will talk to you again on February 1st. Take care, everyone.