NASA Begins Mass Firings ahead of Trump Team’s Deadline
Top advisers in NASA’s Office of the Chief Scientist are among the first to go amid a government-wide downsizing effort
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
For instance, the Office of the Chief Scientist was involved in NASA’s open-science initiative to publicly share data and algorithms, and hosted discussions on reproducibility and scientific ethics, among other topics. “This was where people thought about the future of NASA,” the staff member said. The office also produces internal reports requested by the NASA administrator, including a recent analysis on the possible impacts of involving industry partners in plans to bring rock samples from Mars.
The Office of the Chief Scientist is independent from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees the agency’s US$7-billion science budget and runs missions including the Hubble Space Telescope and the various Mars rovers. The position of NASA chief scientist, which oversees the office, is held by climate scientist Kate Calvin. With the office eliminated, Calvin is expected to return to the US Department of Energy, from which she had been temporarily loaned to NASA.
The firings came without warning on Monday morning, a person who lost their job told Nature. They were particularly shocked that career employees were being terminated ahead of the RIF-plan deadline. “It’s being done in an odd way before the agency even has to let anybody go,” they said. “Prior to everything happening today, NASA has been an incredible place to work — to dream big, to innovate, to do things that I never thought I could have done.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 11, 2025.
Alexandra Witze works for Nature magazine.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com