Taking Over Space: The Administration’s War on the Workforce at NASA

We were having dinner with two former NASA employees, both good friends of ours, when we learned that President Donald Trump had just designated Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy interim NASA administrator. Duffy’s response, posted on X, was typical of so much else that we’ve seen from the Trump administration: “Honored to accept this mission. Time to take over space. Let’s launch.”

Duffy’s few words sum up almost everything about NASA under the Trump administration. They promise bravado, but it’s hard not to notice that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Taking over space” has never been a part of NASA’s mission. NASA is not and never has been an arm of the military. By law, NASA may not pursue military objectives. And by treaty, it can’t claim sovereignty over outer space or extraterrestrial territory. Its mission is to deliver scientific knowledge for the benefit of all humanity, not to stake a claim on the Moon or anywhere else.

As one of our former bosses, the late Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz, once said: “NASA’s the government. But it’s not evil.” They were possibly his kindest words about any part of the federal leviathan. NASA’s not hurting anyone, and it’s already a lot cheaper than many may realize. For more than a decade, it’s been getting just about 0.5% of the annual federal budget. 

One friend at our dinner was in the process of retiring, but they were still on the Signal chat that had blossomed at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in response to the administration’s all-out war on the federal workforce. The mood there was incredulous. Sean Duffy? Why? What does he even know about NASA? 

This is the chaos at hand: Supposedly we’re taking over space—complete with a nuclear reactor on the moon—but we’re doing it on the cheap, and with little to no regard for the well-being of those actually putting in the work. What we’ve been promised so far, and what seems to be taking shape, is like re-running the space race while waging a culture war against the engineers and scientists who are doing the running.

When we term this to be part of an all-out war on the federal workforce, we choose our words carefully. 

We don’t speak of the administration’s all-out war on government spending. There has been a whirlwind of haphazard rearranging, but much of what has been cut were activities that save the government money, that make wise use of resources.

We also don’t speak of a war on the federal bureaucracy. Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE may style themselves the enemies of bureaucracy, but NASA makes a peculiar target for anyone looking to cut red tape and ease citizens’ interactions with the feds. That’s because our space agency’s civil servants don’t apply the laws to the public; unlike the IRS or the EPA, almost no ordinary citizens can possibly fall afoul of a NASA bureaucrat. NASA only regulates its contractors, and only on the work they’ve contracted for. NASA’s employees are engineers, research scientists, communicators, educators, and their support staff. They’re making discoveries about our solar system and continuing the human story of exploration.

Trump and his administration have engaged in this war on the federal workforce in order to aggrandize the president’s power, to prop up his image, and to ensure as much loyalty as possible among what’s left of the civil service. Yet NASA does the public much good work for very little money and with almost none of the prerogatives of a state agent.

They are certainly under the chainsaw anyway. On March 10, Business Insider reported that NASA would be shuttering three departments. By July, the number of departing senior staff had grown to over 2,000, and the total departures stood at 4,000 and growing. That’s 20% of the agency’s workforce. The administration’s budget request for 2026 also cuts NASA’s funding by 24%. That’s not a funny, Washington-style cut that gets made to projected spending, either. It’s a 24% reduction in nominal dollar funding.

In response, some 287 scientists and current and former NASA employees signed the Voyager Declaration, an open letter that reads in part: 

Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully. Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire.

Scientists at other federal agencies have issued similar statements. 

NASA itself now boasts that it’s returning to human space exploration. Whether it can simultaneously explore the Moon and Mars—or safely land humans on either, as it proposes—very much remains to be seen. As the Planetary Society notes, adjusted for inflation, NASA now has its smallest budget since 1961, when human spaceflight was just getting started. Goddard Space Flight Center, the agency’s largest, employs about 10,000 people, both civil servants and contractors. It may be physically shrinking by as much as half, as well as losing its visitor center, exercise facilities, both cafeterias, and even its snack and drink vending machines.

The agency is in disarray. Morale has probably never been lower. Many essential staff have been enticed out of their jobs, taking valuable institutional knowledge with them. We wish our astronauts well, as always, but we fear for their safety. 

Our friends were among the departing staff. They were sad to go, but they knew things wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon. The mood that night at dinner was glum. 

Successful, fully operational spacecraft are being turned off—permanently, irreplaceably—at the whim of politicians. Planned projects are being canceled. Perhaps worst of all, the administration is imposing a dangerously authoritarian workplace culture, one that makes scientific discovery—and human safety—much harder to achieve.

To be sure, Newtonian physics doesn’t care about diversity, but putting a spacecraft in orbit isn’t just about physics. Any project as complex as a spacecraft is also a feat of human organization. When the people aren’t happy, the project suffers, perhaps fatally. Programs that promoted diversity in NASA’s workforce managed to attract many to the agency who might not have found work there otherwise, and who have strengthened the space program with their efforts. Without even searching, we know of at least three disabled people who have left Goddard Space Flight Center in recent months, people who made valuable contributions that might never have been made without the public commitment to diversity that NASA has shown. Diversity is about using everyone’s talents.

That’s true in science, in business, and in government. So many of our modern projects need a staff of hundreds, if not thousands, all of them specialists with different backgrounds and worldviews. As a society, we’re even more diverse than that. Making sure that everyone is welcome, and that all people feel comfortable in diversity, is just sound organizational strategy. 

We’ve also come to understand from our contacts, among the engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center, that the administration is returning to much stricter chain-of-command rules. It’s unclear to us whether the new stance will apply to the whole agency, but chain-of-command organizational strategies have a troubled history at NASA. Following the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia, the official Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report cited as a cause of the disaster “the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organizationʼs rules.”

The Columbia disaster was foreseeable—and it was foreseen. An Air Force imaging asset could have spotted the problem with the orbiter. While Columbia was still in orbit, a request got made—but it was outside the formal chain of command, and so it got suppressed: “The NASA request to the Department of Defense to prepare to image Columbia on-orbit was both made and rescinded within 90 minutes,” said the report.

Seasoned engineers disagreed, but they were strongly dissuaded from acting on their concerns. As one wrote in a contemporary email, which he never sent, “In my humble technical opinion, this is the wrong (and bordering on irresponsible) answer … not to request additional imaging help from any outside source… Remember the NASA safety posters everywhere around stating, ʻIf itʼs not safe, say soʼ? Yes, it’s that serious.”

As the accident report put it: “When asked why he did not send this e-mail, Rocha replied that he did not want to jump the chain of command.”

On January 23—day eight of the doomed mission—a NASA liaison to the U.S. Strategic Command wrote in an email, “The one problem that this has identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels” (emphasis added).

As we now know—and as many at NASA already knew in 2004—respect for the chain of command wasn’t the only problem. On February 1, Columbia broke up on re-entry, with the loss of all seven crew members. As the CAIB Report found, “Management seemed more concerned about the staff following proper channels (even while they were themselves taking informal advice) than they were about the analysis.”

It’s a paradox of human social life that a stricter hierarchy doesn’t always yield a better organization. Chain of command is good for quick, simple, highly patterned, or uniform actions, but NASA’s work is nearly the opposite of all of those things: Missions take many years before they reach the launchpad. They are proverbially complex—they’re literally rocket science. NASA’s scientists and engineers often disagree, with the scientists commonly pushing for more research capacity, and the engineers having to explain and defend the boundaries of mission safety. There are many trade-offs, and they’re both delicate and crucial.

Chains of command struggle with the kind of work that NASA does—the work of knowledge discovery. Knowledge discovery necessarily starts from a place of uncertainty about where and how to find currently unknown knowledge. 

Yes, launches have exacting specifications. Yes, everyone must be in strict compliance with technical requirements. And yes, every mission’s crew has a chain of command, which is necessary to ensure quick action during emergencies, when crewmembers might be incapacitated. But that doesn’t mean that every NASA engineer should always be so regimented. 

The system of Technical Authority that had grown up at the agency has been a good compromise. Individuals in Technical Authority positions have the opportunity to question decisions made on a project for the sake of mission safety, without regard to schedule or budget, and to raise those questions at the highest possible levels. This work is authorized by the Space Act, and individuals in that role function almost as independent ombudsmen for engineering safety at the agency. 

They too are getting restructured. As the signers of the Voyager Declaration put it, “We dissent to changes to NASA’s Technical Authority capacities that are driven by anything other than safety and mission assurance. The culture of organizational silence promoted at NASA over the last six months already represents a dangerous turn away from the lessons learned following the Columbia disaster.”

Clearly there’s a need at a well-run space agency for both serendipitous discovery and, sometimes, a strict chain of command to ensure that a compromised mission continues. But science, and safety, both push toward organizational humility, and toward a workplace environment where free associative, command-defying discoveries are almost always possible. Epistemic humility means management humility, too—the humility to take advice when warranted, to listen to the experts, and to explore rather than conquer.

Featured image is Columbia's Main Engine Powerheads