The New York Times has a devasting attack on NASA

NASA Is Held Down by Its Own Bureaucracy

Today, though, NASA is dominated not by scientists and engineers who think big but by technical managers who rely largely on outside contractors who have themselves been rocked by consolidation, layoffs and lean economic times.

As a result, NASA researchers are producing vastly fewer patents than they did in earlier years, and there has been a recent falloff in papers as well. Other scientists, many of whom questioned the value of the shuttle program from the start, are now surprised at the lack of scientific sophistication displayed by the NASA engineers charged with explaining the Columbia disaster publicly.

A serious criticism of NASA as an aging bureacracy.