Yah me too. I expected more “get shit done” and less “let’s meet to plan when we’re going to talk about putting together the design committee”. It’s an over-staffed bureaucratic nightmare with too many “helpers” and not enough “doers”.
To be fair there is some ENORMOUS talent in certain directorates, but a lot of that has gove over to SpaceX, Blue Origin, et alia.
A friend and I who have been around (not in) the "4 letter agency who shall not be named" have decided one of the problems is after the last "mall" program they started hiring people directly out of college instead of out of industry. This leads to a organization full of people with no real practical experience, in particular experience in making decisions. This leads to a lot of analysis churn trying to make things perfect instead of good enough.
The solution would be to partner with universities for the post-grad research stuff and hire people from "industry" as much as possible. Hopefully the people from industry could pick better people to hire from the post-grad research programs. Likely this will never happen, and it might not fix everything (or anything).
