NASA’s headquarters are located in Washington DC; the building itself ias named after Mary Jackson, the agency’s first African American female engineer.Credit: John M. Chase/Getty
NASA has abruptly closed its chief-scientist office, along with 2 other offices, firing 23 employees. The 10 March action leaves the agency without a way of feeding independent science advice to its topmost leadership, at a time when it is talking about sending astronauts to the Moon and developing plans to go onwards to Mars.
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Janet Petro, the acting NASA administrator, said in an agency-wide e-mail that “we’re viewing this as an opportunity to reshape our workforce”. The lay-offs come days before all US federal agencies are required to submit a plan for how they would eliminate employees, as part of a radical downsizing of the federal government led by US President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk in the name of improving efficiency.
These are NASA’s first firings since Trump took office, and they have taken a different pattern to those at other federal agencies in the past few weeks. NASA was spared, for unknown reasons, from the extensive lay-offs of probationary employees — those with little job protection because they have been in their positions for less than two years — seen at other agencies. The move makes NASA the first agency under the current Trump administration to pre-emptively fire career employees, beginning the required ‘reductions in force’ (RIFs) sooner than many observers had anticipated. It remains unclear whether other agencies might follow NASA’s lead.
The offices closed by NASA are its Office of the Chief Scientist; its Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy; and the diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility branch of its Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity. The cutting of the last of these is a direct result of Trump’s 20 January executive order to slash diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government. But the reason for the closure of the other two offices is not as obvious.
Thinking about the future
Both offices advise NASA’s chief, or administrator, on scientific and technical matters. Petro is filling this position until Trump’s nominee, billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman — a friend of Musk — is confirmed by the US Senate.
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The two offices are unique in that they offer ways of connecting strategy across NASA’s departments and divisions. With their closure, “you will lose strategic thinking”, said a NASA staff member who is familiar with the structure of the offices but did not want to be named for fear of retaliation.
