Seems like
a combination of political and funding mismanagement (April 2011) on what was always forecasted to be an expensive project ...
Quote:
But the problem appears to go beyond mismanagement. Interviews with current and recently retired NASA officials, astronomers and the Government Accountability Office reveal a culture of deception when it comes to estimating the cost of large NASA missions. Given the limited supply of money for new projects, those with proposals are encouraged to underestimate the true price tag, and those who question the estimates are ignored or reprimanded.
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The Goddard team “went into confirmation with a badly flawed budget; the reserves were inadequate,” Casani says. “The first mistake was the wrong budget; the second mistake was that nobody caught it.”
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Casani’s panel found that the project had tried to stay within budget by consistently deferring work that was supposed to be done in one fiscal year to the next. People had to be kept on payroll, and inflation made postponed work more costly. The deferred work ended up costing millions more than had it been done on time, the Casani panel concluded.
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First, although JWST managers at Goddard did a full accounting of potential risks in 2008, they failed to ask for funds to deal with those potential problems in the budget presented at confirmation.
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“The other thing that really astonished us was the lack of insight from headquarters about the project and what it was doing,” Illingworth says. No one was monitoring what was being done or asking why project deadlines hadn’t been met and how this might drive up the overall cost, he says.
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The same problems encountered with JWST are bound to come up again, says Griffin, unless NASA holds individuals accountable. “As long as nothing bad happens to the people who misrepresent the data, then it’s not going to change.”
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I've heard this same story many times, myself.