How NASA Reinvented Government Procurement | Podcast

Most conversations about government procurement focus on rules, compliance, and process. This one is different.
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On Episode 2 of In Pursuit, host Mike Bitchick sits down with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, known as Dr. Z, the former head of science at NASA. During his six and a half years at the agency, he oversaw a budget that grew from $5.6 billion to nearly $8 billion annually, shepherded the James Webb Space Telescope to completion, launched the first commercial lunar payload services program, and helped redefine what government procurement could look like when the right leader is willing to challenge the system.
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His perspective is unlike anyone else who has appeared on this podcast. He is not a procurement officer or an elected official. He is a physicist, an entrepreneur, and a builder who spent years inside one of the most complex government bureaucracies in the world and came out with clear, honest views on what works, what does not, and why.
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Watch the full episode here.
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The Document Problem: How Bureaucracy Really Grows

Dr. Z opens with a story that sets the tone for the entire conversation. For every pound of satellite instruments he built during his research career, he estimated he produced roughly three pounds of paperwork alongside it. Most of that paperwork, in his view, served no real purpose.
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When he arrived at NASA as head of science, he found the same dynamic at scale. Small missions that should have been lean and focused were buried under 70 to 90 documents. By his estimate, five of those documents were genuinely important.
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"For many of these documents, there are now people I want to think deeply about how this mission works. People who can't sleep because they're thinking deeply. They're now doing documents. I'm distracting them from the thing that actually reduces the risk."

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The deeper point is about where bureaucracy comes from. It does not grow because people are lazy or malicious. It grows because every time something goes wrong, the instinct is to add a rule, a document, or a new reporting structure to make sure it never happens again. Over time, the accumulation of those responses becomes the job itself.

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Dr. Z traces much of NASA's documentation culture back to the Challenger disaster. The investigation revealed a leadership failure: engineers had warned that the O-rings would not perform at low temperatures, and those warnings were ignored. The institutional response was not to fix the leadership culture. It was to create independent safety reporting structures so that information could not be suppressed again.

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The result, decades later, was a safety organization that Dr. Z describes as responsible for roughly a third of all questions raised in project meetings, while contributing almost nothing of value to unmanned, lower-cost missions.

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"Of course we want safety. But safety should not be independent of mission. What you end up with is safety documents that just keep adding a little bit more safety. That is how bureaucracy grows."

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The Incentive Problem No One Wants to Talk About

One of the most honest stretches of the conversation comes when Dr. Z unpacks the incentives driving behavior inside large government organizations.

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In the private sector, a company that makes a mistake can absorb it, learn from it, and move on. In government, a mistake becomes a congressional hearing. It becomes a news story. It becomes the defining moment of someone's career, long after the mistake itself has been corrected.

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The rational response to that environment is not to take risks. It is to follow the documented process, use the established vendor, and never make a decision that could be pinned on you if something goes wrong.

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"There are things that are worse than being fired. That is being in a job without any ability to do anything. You're blackballed. You're in the back of the bus. Everyone knows you're the guy who screwed up. Waiting for retirement in the back of the bus, I think that's worse than getting fired."

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This is the culture Dr. Z walked into. It was not populated by bad people. It was populated by good people operating in a system where the consequences of a visible mistake vastly outweighed the rewards of doing something genuinely new.

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James Webb: What a Culture Problem Actually Looks Like

The James Webb Space Telescope is now celebrated as one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. During Dr. Z's early tenure at NASA, it was a project in serious trouble.

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When he arrived, the project had grown half a billion dollars over budget in just six months. Status reports coming up through the organization were consistently positive. The actual state of the project was not.

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"What tends to happen is you get a highly biased view. People are guessing they want to make you happy. There's some garbage over there but let's not talk about it. We'll handle it. He doesn't need to know."

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An independent review confirmed what Dr. Z suspected: the problem was culture, not capability. The team was talented. But the incentive structure, including a cost-plus contract where the contractor's fee accumulated as long as problems stayed hidden, had created a culture of concealment rather than transparency.

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His response was to flip the structure entirely. Instead of asking for good news, he asked for the top three worries on slide two of every project briefing. He brought those worries to Congress publicly rather than managing them behind closed doors. He set hard budget constraints and, in the case of the Roman Space Telescope, went to Congress and asked them to write cost limits into law so that no individual voice, including his own, could be pressured into relaxing them.

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Roman is now ahead of schedule and within budget.

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Commercial Partnerships: A Different Way to Procure

The most transformative procurement work Dr. Z did at NASA was the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, known as CLPS. It represents a genuinely different model for how government can buy what it needs.

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The traditional approach to a lunar lander would have cost one to two billion dollars and taken years to procure. Dr. Z knew there were private companies already working on the problem at a fraction of that cost. Rather than buying hardware and controlling every specification, he structured CLPS as a services purchase: NASA would pay companies to deliver payloads to the moon, not own or manage the vehicles doing it.

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He went to Congress with an explicit expectation of a 50% failure rate. Not as an apology, but as a strategy.

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"I said 50% likely it's like tossing a coin. And so I managed to sell the program that way, basically without overhead. It's overall cheaper, but there are going to be some failures along the way."

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Setting that expectation in advance changed everything about how the program could be run. With a 50% acknowledged failure rate, there was no longer a need to prove 80% certainty at every stage. The safety and mission assurance apparatus that would have added layers of cost and delay to a traditional procurement simply did not apply in the same way.

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The program worked. It produced results at a fraction of traditional cost and opened a new model for government procurement that is still expanding.

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Reused Rockets and the Cost of Excessive Caution

One of the more telling anecdotes in the conversation involves SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters. When SpaceX began reusing rocket boosters, NASA's procurement culture resisted flying on previously used hardware. The instinct was caution.

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Dr. Z pushed back, and he did it by asking Elon Musk a direct question: if you were going to space yourself, how many times would you want the booster to have flown before you felt safe sitting on it?

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The answer was two to three flights. Which is exactly what NASA began requiring.

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"All of a sudden we could do a launch with previously used boosters. Everybody got confident. And frankly, by not using them we were shortchanging the opportunity we get from it."

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The broader point is one that runs through the entire conversation: excessive caution is not actually safe. It just moves the cost somewhere less visible. In this case, it was moving cost to taxpayers who were paying for new boosters when tested, reliable ones were available.

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At the time of recording, SpaceX had launched 156 Falcon 9 rockets in a single year with zero failures. Dr. Z's view on what that track record means for procurement decisions is straightforward: it has to count for something.

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How to Actually Change a Government Organization

Dr. Z is candid that driving change inside NASA required strategies that most career employees would never attempt, precisely because those strategies create friction, upset people, and generate short-term resistance.

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He describes three models of organizational change. The first is slow, incremental culture change, which he found largely ineffective in NASA's environment because the existing reporting structures and incentive systems would restore the old state faster than he could change it. The second is a complete wipeout and rebuild, which he did not have the authority to do. The third is what actually worked: building a new organization with different rules, fencing it off from the existing culture, proving success there, and then gradually shifting resources toward the new model while the old one becomes less relevant.

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"You need to create a different model. A group that fights for its survival and fights for its success under new rules, protected from the toxic stuff in the other one. If you can create success there, you start shuffling money toward it. Feed it more."

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He is also honest about the personal cost. Driving change at that speed and intensity cost him friendships. He walked into labs where people turned away from him. It was only years later, after James Webb was successfully deployed, that colleagues came back to thank him for what he had done.

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What Government Can Learn from This

Dr. Z is careful not to frame his experience as a condemnation of government or the people who work in it. His view is consistent throughout: the people are good. The systems and incentives are broken.

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His closing recommendations for anyone trying to get something done in a large public organization come down to three things. First, respect and honor the people doing the work. Second, have the courage to question the structures they are operating in, not the people themselves. Third, come up with deliberate strategies for change rather than hoping incremental improvement will be enough when the culture is fundamentally misaligned.

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"The vast majority are conscientious, good people in processes and systems where the culture is mismatched, with incentives that are very different. The incentive is to stick with the status quo."

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That is the central insight of this conversation. Government procurement does not fail because of bad people. It fails because the incentives reward caution, punish visible mistakes, and make it structurally difficult for talented people to do their best work.

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Dr. Z found ways around that at NASA. The question his story raises is what it would take to make those ways the rule rather than the exception.

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This post is based on Episode 2 of In Pursuit, featuring Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, former Associate Administrator for Science at NASA. Watch the full episode for more on commercial space partnerships, the James Webb telescope, and what it actually takes to change a government organization from the inside.

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