Folks,
here a view from the other side. My colleagues at NASA include some of the best safety-critical digital systems people and human factors people in the world, and they put out seminal analyses; for example the report on HIRF in the TWA 800 docket; the short paper on evidential reasoning about rare events that is one of the two bases of that subject (which is finding itself in a bit of a crisis at the moment, since far too few engineers know of that work despite that it should be in their university coursework), work on ultrareliable distributed systems for electronic control, the dynamically-reconfigurable fault-tolerant flight control system which operates through normal stick-and-rudder control even when your aerodynamic control is all but gone, and of course they pioneered anonymous reporting systems, which are now mimicked all over the world.
But aviation at NASA is largely organised on a contract basis. They got the HIRF contract, for example, because a Harvard english professor speculated about a military accident with HIRF potentially causing the TWA 800 crash in a literary-political journal, the NYRB, and got into a letters exchange with the head of the NTSB. Smart move by the NTSB: I don't know what the story is but I guess money somehow appeared (publicity in a chattering-classes organ can have that effect sometimes) that they could give to NASA to work on it and the NASA people seem to have leapt at the chance; the report makes great reading.
To do more good work, therefore, NASA needs contracts. From outside: NTSB (which has no money); FAA (which has got to figure out whether to give it to NASA or to use it to train a few more air traffic controllers to relieve the crunch); DoD (which is currently using it to pay for a couple of wars); aerospace manufacturers (who usually prefer to develop and keep their skills in-house) or the U.S. Government (Congress, often led by the Executive Branch). And the Executive Branch has told Professor Griffin that his job is to go to Mars, and cut his resources at the same time.
I have no idea where Professor Griffin's sympathies lie. I think anybody in his position has hisher hands so tied that it may not matter.
I think you will find that if money comes from somewhere there are world-class people there who will be leaping over themselves to get to work and it won't be wasted.
In other words, the problem lies elsewhere. Nobody else cares enough about aviation to provide them the resources. That is a pretty odd state of affairs in a country whose commerce is absolutely dependent on it as their primary mode of transportation between population and industrial centers.
PBL