Obama’s idea is to order that technological advances be made- presumably on time and on budget.
It doesn’t work, but it does provide a convenient scapegoat when the engineers charged with completing the technological advances fail.
If I were advising a young person who was choosing a career under this scenario- I’d tell him to avoid getting involved in the hard sciences and instead choose the law or perhaps community organizing instead.
Wrecking (Russian: вредительство or vreditel'stvo, lit. "inflicting damage"), was a crime specified in the criminal code of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It is often translated as "sabotage"; however "wrecking" and "diversionist acts" and "counter-revolutionary sabotage" were distinct sub-articles of Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) (58-7, 58-9, and 58-14 respectively), and the meaning of "wrecking" is closer to "undermining".