"Gibs fo NASA but none fo me"
Well, I do have to say that both NASA and many other government agencies are white-collar welfare programs.
When I was at NASA, perhaps 10% of the people there worked, and those 10% were all contractors (like myself). Others, especially the federal employees, went to a meeting or two, did some paperwork, and the took credit for the work done by contactors. NASA Glenn Research Center in the Cleveland area had an on-site (free to federal employees) daycare center, a fitness center, a post office / credit union, mess hall, etc. People rolled into "work" at around 10, dropped their kids (usually 1 kid) off at day care, checked a few emails, then went to lunch. They'd go to the post office / credit union to pay bills or do other transactions, then mid-afternoon would head over to the fitness center. They'd disappear by 4 after picking their kid(s) up ... if they weren't "working" remotely. When they were remote, they never answered e-mails or picked up the phone (obviously were not working), usually 2-3 days per week. Some of them took the entire summer off with their generous vacation / PTO allotments. In addition, they probably went to 4-5 weeks of "training" each year to allegedly learn skills that they would never use and that would and therefore be lost. On top of all this, they don't have to pay into Social Security but get their own federal employees pension plan. I knew people who retired from there (at a young age) with a million dollar pension account that they put little into themselves. AND their pay rates average well above those of their private sector counterparts, people who had to actually know what they're doing. On top of that, no one could be laid off for incompetence or laziness, as they were protected by the union ... further incentivizing them to do nothing and learn nothing. In fact, I got in trouble one time because I had to move my office across the hall. We had to put in a request for some dedicated employees to move computer servers. Well, I had moved, and after having waited 2 weeks for them to show up, I shut the server down, unplugged it, walked it across the hall, plugged it back in, powered it back on. I got yelled at because I was not supposed to be doing that work (evidently unqualified to do so), as it was earmarked for union employees. So these busy people, that probably worked 5 hours per week, so took 2 weeks to get to my 10-minute job, they alone were qualified to move servers. I said, "What was I supposed to do, sit here for 2 weeks doing no work because I didn't have the servers?" Evidently the correct answer there was "Yes."
At NASA Glenn, if you were totally useless, a federal employee, the last resort was to transfer you to the "Wind Tunnel Advocacy Group". Glenn had one of the few wind tunnels in the country that could be used for aerospce testing, and this group sent letters and e-mails to companies trying to sell the use of the wind tunnel. Of course, they would try to fire you if you weren't woke or politically correct, but you were untouchable for incompetence or laziness or general lack of productivity. We had a "programmer" there, a female, federal employee, who years ago was making $130,000, who boasted at a meeting (while laughing about it), "I'm incompetent." This was a "developer", who couldn't write a line of code if her life depended on it, and who was unhirable at $30K per year much less than the $130K she was making there. Oh, BTW, if you were a White male, you need not apply for these federal positions, as they were being filled by females and/or People of Color. You could be the greatest developer in the world, but if you were White male, your resume went into the Recycle Bin. I tried, and I could program circles around the women or Black men who eventually got hired for these positions. There were guys there who refused to retire ... the only White males being old timers who were hired before the affirmative action craze ... one guy who spent literally the entire day at the fitness center (he was a joke even among all the other lazy types) and another who just sat at his desk surfing the web (he refused to retire because he hated his wife and detested the thought of being at home with her all the time, and openly admitted his motivation).
Not one word of this is hyperbole ... but comes from direct experience.
So, to your comment, NASA is a much more expensive welfare state than just handing out EBT cards to all People of Color.
When people talk to me about how it's impossible to hide a conspiracy on the level of the moon landing or ISS ... they know nothing about that place. They liked to brag about working for NASA, leaving people the impression they were brilliant rocket scientists, but I know that the OPPOSITE is true. I got a lot of interest for future jobs because of NASA on my resume, but if I were hiring and I saw a programmer with a NASA background, I would pitch the resume without even looking at it further.
Meanwhile, after 9/11, before I was aware of the conspiracy, some guy on a Glenn message board posted a comment about how we should turn Afghanistan into a sheet of glass, and I just responded that this was terrible, to kill innocent civilians over the actions of a few, I had a jack-booted security manager come into my office and yell at me in front of my boss, about it. I asked if I had freedom of speech, and he said "No, you work for the government." My boss told me later that "everybody wanted you fired" after that. Imagine what they'd think now: "9/11 was a Mossad operation." LOL. Evidently though the Glenn federal employees asked to keep me on because I did a very good job and was productive, making them look good. They needed someone who could get work done they could take credit for. Yes, they had their own chat board, on which employess not only opined, but also used to sell personal items (I sold a used car I had there one time).
Post 9/11 hysteria was ridiculous. Some woman couldn't find her purse, so they locked the place down for a potential terrorist threat. Same thing happened when some guy left powder from a donut on a table and they suspected anthrax. Heck, people were constantly eating donuts and drinking coffee. We had a disgruntled employee who cut some wires on a piece of hardware. They brought everyone in one by one to interrogate us and treated it like a "terrorist" act. One guy was rebuked and interrogated over belonging to the NRA (they did background checks on us before our interrogation session). Guy who did it had just written garbage software that didn't work, so to buy some time, he cut the wires so he could blame a hardware failure for the delays. We all knew who it was ... but couldn't prove it. Before 9/11, security guards did nothing. When people forgot their badges for entry to the Glenn compound, they'd drive in and hold up a cigarrette box and were waved through as the security guards didn't even bother to look ... as long as someone looked like they were attempting to show something roughly the size of a badge. After 9/11, though, they acted like jack-booted thugs and relished the power, making them feel like bigshots when they were just low-level security.
I could go on for hours, but the federal government is a joke and nothing but a shameless theft of taxpayer money.
I'd rather just "gibs" EBT cards to all of them and send them all packing.