Who Controls Where the James Webb Telescope Looks?

The day before Christmas the James Webb Telescope took off from a spaceport in French Guiana. NASA originally envisioned a launch somewhere between 2007 and 2011, for a total cost between 1 billion and 3.5 billion dollars. But the James Webb Telescope continued to miss one launch date after the next, while its total cost ballooned to nearly 10 billion. With astronomers' and science lovers' hopes and dreams being carried to space along with it, it’s worth asking, who gets to control the world's most powerful telescope?

While NASA put the telescope in orbit, the Space Telescope Science Institute, a consortium of 47 US institutions that operate telescopes and observatories around the world is the body that chooses who gets to use it. They sifted through the 1,173 proposal requests they had received for the observatory’s first year of life — known as Cycle 1- to decide who got time on the telescope. They made their decisions based on 3 criteria.
1. How much the proposal would impact knowledge within a selected subfield, 2. How much it would advance astronomy in general, and 3. whether the proposal really required the unique capabilities of the James Webb Telescope to be successful.