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I'm honestly not sure if this is sarcasm. If not I must be having one of those "fundamental disconnect" or "Queeg" moments.
Seriously, what is NASA's purpose? is it to advance human knowledge of Aeronautics and Space Flight or is it just a welfare program for white-collar Floridians and Houstonians?
Paying people to work on something that you know will never fly is not just "inefficient" it is counter-productive. You're literally spending money to PREVENT people from building actual rockets. Money could just as easily be spent on actually trying to advance human knowledge of Aeronautics and Space Flight.
No sarcasm at all. NASA's mission IS to advance human knowledge of aeronautics and space flight, a mission that often involves programs that take several decades to plan and execute. Sadly, NASA is stuck with a political appropriations situation where they need to keep churning out a new shiny for the politicians within each electoral cycle to keep the limited money that they do get in their budget.
Some people might call these paper projects pork, and they might be right. But a good bit of that "pork" comes in the form of retaining very smart and experienced people, people who really want to be working on cutting edge research projects. Call it white collar welfare if you wish, but it really is an exercise in human resources retention.
NASA right now is figuring out just how much of its LEO operations can be farmed out to commercial interests, and are trying to figure out a logical long term direction for NASA. It's a transitional time and they don't quite know what direction they are going to need to go. What they DO know is that they need to keep their hard-won program experience and people close by to lead future efforts, whatever they may be.
If all of that knowledge up and walked out the door, how many years and how much money would it take to resurrect an organization with the same capability? How much knowledge would need to be re-learned, possibly in a hard and bloody way? If you look at organizations that have done this sort of downsizing and attempted to build their capacity again later you'll see that in the long run it is much more economical to pay people to rearrange their pencils on their desks for a while until business picks up.
The alternatives to "white collar welfare" in technical programs are cutting experienced staff and then hoping they will come back, or worse - believing that you can hire some young kid fresh out of school and they will automagically have the same wisdom, experience, and capability of someone who has been through the fire several times. These alternatives are the favorites of the company bean-counters, but they never work well for highly-technical engineering & scientific programs, government or commercial.
