Followup on MSL: Griffin's spin

I just wrote about the delay in the MSL mission. During the NASA press conference, NASA Admin Mike Griffin was asked about NASA's endemic cost overruns, specifically the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, an ambitious successor to Hubble. Griffin's response to this made my jaw drop: he said that JWST is not suffering cost overruns, and in fact "in no way" could you say it is over budget. Griffin is so overwhelmingly wrong in that statement that I have to say that at best this is incredible spin on his part. In the late 1990s, when JWST was first being designed, its estimated cost of JWST was about $900 million (that included a ten-year lifetime operations cost, though not the $450 million launch cost). Its current cost? $4.5 billion. It's very hard to reconcile that last number with Mike Griffin's statement that in no way can you say ...