By the end of today, NASA's workforce will be about 10 percent smaller | Hacker News Reader

By the end of today, NASA's workforce will be about 10 percent smaller

arstechnica.com

140 pointsbelter195 comments

It sounds like they're firing the wrong 10%.

From what I've heard, the problem at NASA is it has a lot of lifers who justify their positions through bureaucracy.

This reduction gets rid of the people at NASA who actually get stuff done. People who get stuff done can easily find jobs in industry, so are more likely to accept buyouts. It also gets rid of the young probationary employees who are still idealistic and have not yet been corrupted by the system.

I imagine that laying off the best would lead to a decline in overall performance that would justify further cuts.

To me, the question is: if it's true that a bunch of lifers are wasting people's hard-earned tax money by being there, therefore management have not done a good job over a long period of time, also taking salaries to do so, then what do you do about it?

A fair question to ask. But, whatever the solution is, "firing all of the new blood" seems pretty much the opposite of whatever the solution might be.

Is that what's happening?

Edit: I didn't see the bit about probation. I think that's probably because you have to start with people on probation if you're making people redundant, right?

No, they're doing it to probationary employees because they're aren't protected by the same laws that require cause for firing.

Political appointees require 30 days notice, rank-and-file must be given cause.

Yeah. They have less protection, less political power to resist. They also presumably generally aren't running important things and filled with tribal knowledge so at least in the short term they are more disposable (if you don't care about the future)

I don't mean that - I mean it's unlikely you can have people on probation stay on while making other people redundant, just from the perspective of regulations or union rules around redundancy.

Overall, NASA doesn't strike me as a place full of people leeching off government salaries with no benefit. They create valuable stuff. But the article mentions things like committing to suboptimal projects just so some senior workers can keep doing the same job... That sounds pretty bad. Space agencies shouldn't be jobs programs.

Everyone thinks that about agencies like NNSA and NASA, but then once you get under the covers it's a government agency like every other one. There are clerks and contract analysts and HR drones and people who push paper to other people who push paper in a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine.

Same thing with the Intelligence Community: lots of DMV-like cogs that have TS clearances but otherwise are little different than the masses occupying the Social Security office down the street.

Then you fire those "HR drones" along with the ostensibly "useful" people and suddenly you can't reach the "useful" people to rehire them because you fired HR.

And then they can find jobs at SpaceX.

This is the intended outcome from neoliberal parasites like Thiel and Musk. They want public government to look like an absolute joke so private corporations can take over with zero regulation and extract as much profit/wealth.

> People who get stuff done can easily find jobs in industry

> It also gets rid of the young probationary employees who are still idealistic

So you're saying there's suddenly a bunch of space engineers on the market looking to accept whatever terms some space contractor offers them? I wonder which space contractors already have a list with their names and personnel information...

first thought as well. Scary time. Unionize.

They're actively gutting the NLRB too, I doubt there will be any meaningful action out of that agency against antiunion activities no matter how blatant until at least Jan 20, 2029.

It's no accident that the NLRB was one of the first agencies to get gutted.

Lots of agencies that were looking into one of Musk's many companies were the first targets of DOGE.

And the CFPB would be one of the ones looking into X as a payment platform which X has just partnered with Visa on [0]

Timing is coincidental, of course.

It is even worse than that. Musk is currently suing to argue that the NLRB is more-or-less entirely unconstitutional. There's a meaningful chance that labor organizing protections simply permanently end within the next couple years.

And I imagine it's going to get a less than resounding defense given one of the P2025 goals is abolishing it.

NLRB going away will be a short term pain, but long term its better for the health of unions to not have to follow restrictive legal guidelines.

The unshackling will be one sided. I'm sure unions will still be forced by courts to follow all the old rules it's the companies that will get to flout union votes and retaliate freely without the NLRB.

If you think unions would have protected skilled, new employees on probationary periods from being laid off at the expense of unproductive, highly-senior employees, boy do I have news for you.

Not the panacea you think it might be.

A strike by NASA employees would hurt NASA employees far more than it would anyone else. I'm sure Elon and the prez would love a walkout by said employees.

Congress, not unions, should be the guardian of civil servant rights. But of course, public service unions are the largest donors to Congress, which then drives the narrative of a corrupt and bloated civil service.

Public service unions are the largest donors to Congress? ... how?!

I mean, I don't have stats in front of me but how could possibly public service unions compete with the largest companies in the world?

I doubt this was a ploy to poach those people. SpaceX surely could have hired them anyway. And who's to say they won't go work for some other company. However if this hurts NASA, it gives SpaceX an advantage.

Yes, there are a lot of lifers and they have social connection to support each other. Every younger person I know who tried NASA (government jobs not subcontractor) has absolutely hated its culture and found the lack of productivity boring. At least in my small sample, they all left and went private. The ones who stay are happy to be doing little and can tolerate the politics.

Change the laws so we can fire federal workers based on productivity instead of seniority.

Or change the laws so we can accurately measure productivity of the separate parts of a huge organisation!

Now if I can just remember where I put my glass ball that told me who was how productive....

How do you measure productivity, better than "I know it when I see it"?

Software development is one of the best studied areas for what productivity is, and the thing that everyone agrees is that there are no good metrics for it. For all sorts of jobs above "tier 1 customer service (which can be measured in calls per hour)" it gets really hard to measure, and even that is very open to gaming in ways that lead to bad outcomes- e.g. the entire history of Goodhart's Law.

Let their manager decide.

The reason civil service protections exist is that when managers could fire everyone, and managers were chosen based on being the friend of the guy who just won the election, it lead to massive corruption and ineffective and hollowed out bureaucracy.

This was realized by everyone 150 years ago, which is why they created civil service protections to begin with. You need a better solution to that problem, otherwise you are just repeating the mistakes of the 1870s. I'm prepared to believe that there is a better idea out there. But just going back to the 1870s, with all of its problems, for sure ain't it.

> People who get stuff done can easily find jobs in industry, so are more likely to accept buyouts.

Who wants to give up a fed pension for a 401k?!

Is it a pension? I thought they were on a government 401k (TSP).

Probationary in the civil service does not equate to young or junior. A person with decades of experience can get promoted and must go through a probationary period.

Thanks for making my original point stronger. Firing the recently promoted seems insane -- aren't those your best employees?

> aren't those your best employees?

I would think so. Promoting someone implies they are exceeding expectations in their current role[1].

1. I do acknowledge that in any large organization some people end up promoted despite not meeting the requirements of the job. I'll leave it to the reader to decide where that kind of promotion style might be at play currently.

Wrong sadly depends on perspective.

When you see someone seemingly contradicting their stated goals, ask yourself if perhaps they have different, unstated, goals.

- "they're firing the wrong 10%"

This was something people overlooked about the CDC layoffs: those, likewise, targeted people who were administratively easy to fire, which in that case was highly skilled experts hired under an exceptional federal employment statute ("Title 42"), which allowed them far higher salaries than other public service workers—but without the standard protections.

- "EIS officers are hired under Title 42, a mechanism that allows the federal government to bring in the best and the brightest, in some cases paying them at rates higher than the typical public sector wages. It offers workers fewer job protections, however, making Title 42 workers easier to fire."

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/trump-cdc-cuts-include-e...

Normalization of deviance, the process of becoming inured to risky actions, is a useful concept for today that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster, and later the 2003 Columbia disaster, happened.

It's what DOGE is doing: becoming inured to risky actions.

>>the problem at NASA is it has a lot of lifers who justify their positions through bureaucracy

Not every job in the world works well with 'Move fast, and break things' philosophy.

Doing things quickly isn't even a goal for NASA. Doing things right is.

Why do people keep saying every thing either needs to be as chaotic as a dorm room start up or cease to exist?

Taking the engine out of the car to reduce weight and improve efficiency

No biggie... the effects won't be seen until a Democrat is in charge again, business as usual.

Because Nasa is renowned to be an efficient organisation which has in recent times made good decisions? The space shuttle springs to mind.

Many of those leaving Nasa today are probationary employees in their first years of employment. This isn't making up for past mistakes, it is hurting Nasa's future.

Can it not be simultaneously true that NASA has areas of bloat/inefficiency AND haphazard amateurish cuts will cause more harm than good?

Impossible, nuance is dead

Yup, and empathy along with it.

I like this description of how the space shuttle got this way [1]. I don't think I'd hold NASA responsible for that.

Edit: I understand that The Space Shuttle Decision by T. A. Heppenheimer [2] contains a lot of the information that's in the Metafilter post, but in a more sober tone. The PDF is available direct from NASA [2]. It does at least mention that NASA itself wanted to cancel the shuttle program.

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/48654/Jan-28-1986#1189388

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sp-4221.pdf

Wasn’t the space shuttle program dictated by the needs of the military? Something tells me any NASA military pork won’t be touched, it’ll be the scientists.

No. It was kept alive by congressional decree for at least a decade after NASA wanted to wind it down.

The explicit reason for this was that parts of the space shuttle were built in 50 states, and the “economic stimulus” trumped things like science or national security.

Answered my own question.

Yes[1].

You're talking about the how of the space shuttle construction but not the why. It was indeed intended for at least some military use, and it was originally intended to be capable of polar orbits and would've launched from Vandenberg.

Of course there was major government pork and horse trading to southern states but this was a side effect of the project, not the primary driver.

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1398/did-the-space...

The design was dictated in part by military needs, but then the DOD figured out their requirements resulted in such a compromised design that it was cheaper and more reliable to keep launching Titan III and later expendables.

Please tell me what large organization out there doesn't have at least a few inefficiencies. This notion that only the federal government is bloated and inefficient is so untrue. Every try dealing with or working for a big telecom?

the SLS springs to mind.

Boeing’s SLS? I don’t think cutting NASA employees is going to help much.

https://www.boeing.com/space/space-launch-system#rocket

Are you referring to space disasters that occurred more than 20 and nearly 40 years ago as “recent”? Or are you talking about the design of the space shuttle, that literally occurred during the Nixon administration?

What does "efficient" mean for an organization such as NASA?

A: I am not convinced GOOD science and GOOD engineering means a quick turn around. So in my opinion having less quantity for higher quality output is efficient.

B: While there are many missions and projects at NASA it seems a bit unfair to judge their workings when they seem to have major changes in direction every 4-8 years mandated upon them.

Space Shuttle hasn't flown in 14 years, the decision to retire it was made 21 years ago, they stopped making space shuttles 33 years ago, the system was designed over 50 years ago when the current NASA administrator was a child. What are these "recent times" you are referring to?

SLS

> SLS

Mandated by Congress.

From my reading of the shuttle history, you can blame the USAF for the vehicle we finally got.

Of course, the Space Shuttle (and SLS, for that matter), are bad designs and inefficient not because NASA teams design them that way, but because of the way Congress funds things. They add mandates, and require the contracts to be spread across lots of organizations and states to "budget proof" the projects.

For example, NASA's original space plane was a much better design that the shuttle, but they were forced to make it a joint project with the Air Force to get budget. The different requirements added up, and eventually we got the system we've all seen.

I mean the decision to award a contract to Boeing is a much more recent gaff. What a joke!

Just an anecdote but my family member does university research and gets grants from NASA (also is ex NASA and left NASA due to too many rest & vest folks). In the last round of reviews there were 20+ NASA employees sent locally to review for a couple 1 hour meetings. Initial take from the outside is it looked like a seriously bloated process.

They're firing probationary employees -- newer hires and recent promotions. The "rest & vest" types don't fall into that category.

Any large organisation operates the same way. Once a business reaches a certain size, you can't implicitly trust every individual with critical functions. Statistically, someone will eventually break something in a catastrophic way.

To prevent that, organisations introduce policies, processes, and review committees to keep things running smoothly.

It’s always possible to cut back bureaucracy, but it’s a constant balancing act between efficiency and security.

Sure but large organizations that operate as for-profit businesses will collapse. Government organizations can last much longer and sometimes never collapse under the weight, they just entirely stop being effective.

Some things can only be achieved by large and inefficient organisations though. E.g. no for-profit enterprise would have been able to get to the moon in the 60s.

As someone who worked inside Honeywell for 10 years, I can tell you that "large organizations that operate as for-profit businesses will collapse" is absolutely not a true generalization. Everything the GP said about large organizations is true, and after a decade of seeing HW as one of the worst organizations in practice, their stock price was much higher than when I joined because that's the outcome the C suite pursued.

This reliance on the profit motive to enforce a Darwinian culling of private enterprises is a spherical cow.

> This reliance on the profit motive to enforce a Darwinian culling of private enterprises is a spherical cow.

Absolutely. Large organizations tend towards self-preservative activities in the long run. One such thing is rent-seeking and regulatory capture (i.e. getting laws passed that entrench and defend your business from disruption).

It also seems that a lot of forces in the economy tend to favor mergers and centralization, which protects businesses from disruption and further entrenches their positions. Eventually the profit dictates that they'll raise prices to cover their inefficiencies and it's ultimately consumers that lose, because they can't exit the system and competition is dead.

The scale isn't that different if you look at larger firms. Sears started ailing it was the early 80s, and it's still sort of in existence, limping along.

Meanwhile, Meta spent $80 billion on VR and AR, because they felt like it. Apple spent $10 billion developing a car and then cancelled. Most Google X projects get cancelled.

Tech companies are not efficient. As long as they make gobs of money, they don't have to be.

>>Tech companies are not efficient.

Wait till you hear the supposed 'top talent' they hire doesn't perform any better than most normal people you would meet at any company.

Im guessing when you are rich, you tend to use that as a justification to do whatever you want.

Start ups succeed despite chaos, not because of chaos. Its crazy how brakes are now being confused for accelerators.

Take the price of that trip and divide it by the amount of money they allocated during the trip.

You’ll find that, if being in person corrects one grant approval /rejection mistake, the trip saves >>> 100x what it costs.

Also, typical grant processes like that involve months of prep work for each person, and they certainly made all the easy decisions before meeting in person.

So, the day or so they spent on discussions was to reconcile disagreements and misunderstandings with high monetary stakes.

Sure maybe but that's not their concern here, and fixing bloat is not their goal. Elon musk is dismantling the state for his own benefit. Someone doing some similar things could have a worthwhile purpose, but he does not.

Not sure in how many countries it would be ok to slash NASA personnel while having your own space company.

Wouldn't an expansion of NASA benefit SpaceX, not the inverse? They don't exactly compete.

They don't compete, but a cynic might say that cutting NASA personnel expenses frees up money to buy more launch services from vendors like SpaceX.

They absolutely compete. SLS and Starship, for example.

Boeing builds SLS, not NASA. NASA is the paying customer.

Boeing builds SLS to NASA's specs. They're a contractor; Boeing has no other use for the rocket.

Starship is a very different scenario; SpaceX fully intends for it to serve their own purposes as well.

Regardless of the decision, a businessman being in control of the government agency that funds his company is as bad as it gets in terms of corruption.

Next time there's a tender, how will the NASA employee know whether their decision wrt SpaceX is going to get them fired or not?

why isn't it considered corruption if you've been a career employee and you get promoted to be in control of an agency? You'll be tendering all of the salaries of all of the people you've known and/or contracted with over your career.

(im not saying elon is good here)

Because you don’t have a direct financial incentive to embezzle funds or sabotage the agency’s mission.

Elon does.

Also, these career employees rose through the ranks based on job performance, and did so regardless of which political party was in charge.

1. direct financial incentive is not the only form of corruption

> Elon does.

note the "not defending elon" bit.

> these career employees rose through the ranks based on job performance,

2. thats laughable (i have a direct relative who works for the federal government and based on their commentary thats a crazy thing to believe)

The agency head does not tender salaries, or set government service payscale, or even make the vast majority of hiring decisions.

> why isn't it considered corruption if you've been a career employee and you get promoted to be in control of an agency?

Because a civil servant being promoted to be "in control" merely means that they become the first contact the political administrators give their orders/roadmap to, and their role is to execute on that roadmap. They don't get to decide the agency budget or goals, and they're the one who get fired when they're in conflict with elected officials or their representatives, or if issues with the administration come up.

The inverse benefits SpaceX, because NASA has less capability to do things itself therefore is more dependent on contracting work out to SpaceX.

They compete for talent, definitely.

Also for public mindshare. Which translates into funding. Congress likes to fund popular stuff because it helps them get re-elected. They do not like to fund unpopular stuff.

I get the sentiment, but NASA doesn't really compete with SpaceX on anything. They pay SpaceX for launches.

NASA has essentially 0 in-house manufacturing nowdays. Separate question whether that's a good thing, but that's not something the current NASA headcount is doing.

If anything, slowing down NASA slows down launch cadence which hurts SpaceX.

> They pay SpaceX for launches.

Sounds like it is easier to cut out the middleman, eventually? (Only half-joking)

I work for a NASA contractor. This is a very stupid, bad move, since young and recently-called-up civil servant talent are often the people we really want to keep. We will be hurting on the Artemis program if the probationary civil servants all fired.

In general, I agree that a thorough house-cleaning of NASA would be great for technical achievement, but this is one of the stupidest ways you could do it.

Do you think it was stupid or premeditated ?

Both.

> In general, I agree that a thorough house-cleaning of NASA would be great for technical achievement, but this is one of the stupidest ways you could do it.

Unfortunately it's business as usual for the X-style organization reform model. (Not that Musk was the first to do this, of course.)

I am no fan of Musk, but I have always admired his tactics and insights as a technical executive. His actions in X and the government are bizarre, though. I am starting to wonder if he aims to take control of the government directly within his lifetime.

Surely it's a conflict of interest when private space man fires government space people?

Unless there's nobody to do something about it.

Like the conflict between grass and a hungry herd of cows. Is it really a conflict of it's that one-sided?

I'm pretty sure voters actively want "conflict of interest" as long as their team is winning the conflict. Though it should be obvious to them that Elon is only pretending to be on their team.

That's great. Was it done in a way that is in accordance with the law, or are we trying to run government like a business, which it definitely should not be?

Businesses are ran according to the law, and get punished if they don't. Sometimes that doesn't happen with the govt

> get punished

Hard disagree on that one. Businesses calculate risk exposure and feign concern when forced (if ever) to pay fines after a lengthy legal battle in which the government goes up against extremely well-paid private lawyers that are financed from the profits of illegal activity. Compliance with the law is just a cost at this point.

And flippin' nobody goes to jail for white collar crime anymore.

> Businesses are ran according to the law, and get punished if they don't.

Do you want to spend the rest of your afternoon reading about cases where businesses didn't get punished for not running according to the law? Even in the cases where they are punished, it's often well within the cost of doing business.

> Sometimes that doesn't happen with the govt

For example: right now. We have a buddy of the President deciding to lay off thousands of employees without any respect for the legal procedures for doing so.

OpenAI and Facebook have been pirating content to train their models. Do you honestly expect them to be punished? The law is not the only thing that matters

Many of the largest businesses nowadays are run in the most immoral, cutthroat and corrupt way possible with armies of lawyers who’s job is to stall the process and find loop holes in the existing laws so they can keep operating with impunity.

> with armies of lawyers who’s job is to stall the process

Absolutely, and that's just in a well-functioning justice system. Run that cycle through a few times, and the government finally realizes that fighting losing battles in court is a waste of money, and gets extremely conservative about who they do choose to prosecute, opting only to prosecute when they are sure of a quick and decisive convinction--that further entrenches powerful players who are effectively immune from prosecution just because the government balks at the effort.

In a corrupt system, it gets even worse; businesses pay off government officials directly or indirectly, businesses hire lobbyists to write legislation that entrenches their positions, protects them from competition, and worse, actively stifles competition.

Every system tends toward corruption, regardless of the -ism, and regardless if it is privately or publicly run. The antidote is accountability. Unfortunately the American system has fallen into such bitter polarization that no political leaders are ever held accountable. So we get corruption, and it's compounding massively now.

NASA will likely find themselves in a position where they have to outsource more work to companies like ... SpaceX.

What a coincidence, and a totally unexpected outcome from these cuts to "save taxpayer money".

Ultimately the goal is privatization. Ask the British how privatizing their rail network has worked out for the average citizen.

Privatizing the water companies would be an even better comparison: literally a shit-show. Privatization only works if there's competition.

From the article itself:

"Are cuts needed?

It is also clear that, as within other federal agencies, there is significant "bloat" in NASA's budget. In some areas, this is plain to see, with the space agency having spent in excess of $3 billion a year over the last decade "developing" a heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which used components from the Space Shuttle and costs an extraordinary amount of money to fly. In the meantime, the private launch industry has been running circles around NASA. Similarly, consider the Orion spacecraft. This program is now two decades old, at a cost of $1 billion a year, and the vehicle has never flown humans into space.

One could go on. Much of the space community has been puzzled as to why NASA has been spending on the order of half a billion dollars to develop a Lunar Gateway in an odd orbit around the Moon. It remains years away from launching, and if it ever does fly, it would increase the energy needed to reach the surface of the Moon. The reason, according to multiple sources at the agency when the Gateway was conceived, is that the lunar space station would offer jobs to the current flight controllers operating the International Space Station, which is due to retire in 2030."

SLS flew around the moon. SpaceX Starship sent a banana to the Indian ocean. I mean come on, let's stop kidding ourselves.

SLS program has currently flown once to the tune of a cool $26.4 billion. The cost per launch of the final system is expected to be roughly $2 billion.

Starship has flown 7 times for roughly $5 billion. The expected cost per launch of the final system is expected to be roughly $10 million.

I don't agree this is as cut and dry as you're laying out.

Starship hasn't even reached orbit yet even after 7 launches. When you pay bargain basement prices, you get bargain basement performance.

Both have been in development for roughly the same time (12-13 years). SLS already went around the moon, while Starship hasn't reached orbit. Starship is WAY behind schedule.

To date neither system has flown a real mission, and SLS was originally scheduled to be operational by 2016. Was there a particular schedule for Starship you had in mind?

https://www.planetary.org/articles/20170515-anatomy-of-delay...

I'm also surprised you're willing and able to wave a 50x difference in cost. Sure, SpaceX is still in a bit of a riskier position, having developed all new hardware. But with what we've seen today, are you really claiming that companies are going to be lining up to pay $2 billion for the privilege of riding Boing? Or are you just betting that Starship won't fly?

I wonder why this article didn't point out that SpaceX has received somewhere in the realm of 20 billion in federal dollars from government contracts over the past decade.

Shame no one is going to consider cutting those wasteful contracts.

Just goes to show you can actually get into space for that kind of money in the private sector.

Maybe? SpaceX has done some amazing things, but they've also been given more freedom than anyone as NASA has. Does NASA routinely break FAA flight rules or environmental laws? Can NASA talk about rocket explosions as a success?

Living close to Vandenberg, I can assure you that the taxpayer actually gets something for that money. I see and hear the product of the dollars spent lifting cargo into orbit quite regularly.

OTOH, I have never seen a tiny bit of tangible benefit from consultancies getting paychecks from NASA to make presentations about equity and environmental justice, which was a big push from our national space agency until very recently.

Well, the answers are simple. Congressmen and senators, and sometimes presidents (Orion was George W's baby), demand that NASA spend money on stupid shit that NASA doesn't actually want to spend money on, and also demands that NASA spend that money in specific districts around the country to maximize the dollars they claim they brought to their district while minimizing NASA's efficiency.

It is not just that. [0] New Horizons was almost scrapped by Gorge W because of JPL lobbyist that where trying to bloat the project. Where APL was dramatically below and checked all the boxes.

It is also the lobbyist that push bloat to make more money.

[0] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chasing-new-horizons-alan-s...

You're making the case for the cuts, correct?

I'm making the case of corruption from the top down with politicians, lobbyist are their financial backers. Either through donations or insider trading.

So why throw good money after bad?

> Much of the space community has been puzzled

No one is puzzled. Everyone knows why, Congress mandated it.

This is a particularly bizarre part of the article to me. Certainly Eric Berger, the article's author who's written more than one book on space at this point knows this.

The President appoints NASA's administrator (subject to Senate approval, of course) and Congress controls NASA's budget. How anyone is puzzled by NASA's focus is beyond me. If I'm being pessimistic, I would assume such people are woefully ignorant of how NASA (and maybe the government as a whole) works. I try to be pessimistic instead of cynical because if I were cynical then I would assume a bunch of negative ulterior motives.

Has Congress actually mandated any of this? Near as I can tell, they definitely haven’t

Here is a link [0] to the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. And here's a relevant snippet:

"The Administrator shall ensure that NASA carries out a balanced set of programs that shall include, at a minimum, programs in— ... (A) human space flight, in accordance with subsection (b); ... The Administrator shall establish a pro- gram to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Administrator is further authorized to develop and conduct appropriate international collaborations in pursuit of these goals."

Artemis grew out of these efforts and enjoyed fairly bipartisan support over the years (including by President Trump in his first term, see [1]).

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-109publ155/pdf/PLAW...

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-space-policy-directive...

And this authorizes mass layoffs and doing things for profit how?

I didn't say nor mean to imply it did. I assumed your initial question about a congressional mandate was about Artemis rather than the layoffs specifically as that's what sparked this comment chain (the wonderment at NASA spending money on Artemis and the Lunar Gateway).

You're quoting selectively. Berger's point is not just that there's significant "bloat" within NASA, it's that Musk isn't addressing that bloat in a sensible way. Cutting people because they are recent hires and happen to be easier to fire means keeping the programs that Berger thinks are misguided (at least for the time being) but making basically random cuts everywhere else, without any regard for impact.

You're getting downvoted, which maybe isn't great since there's an important point here that you missed, and it might be worth mentioning.

The SLS is an incredibly expensive boondoggle, a result of pork barrel politics, and so on, but it hasn't caused a massive spike in headcount at NASA proportional to its cost. There are some managers at NASA dealing with it, and if it goes away, they'll deal with something else. The big headcount with SLS is in the private sector, at the contractors.

NASA has pushed back on some of this stupid shit to the fullest extent it can, given the political reality that it has to make whatever congress funds. Maybe you regard DOGE as a potential remedy to that, but firing a bunch of people is orthogonal to that effort.

I'm not saying DOGE is or isn't a solution. More that NASA may be past its sell-by date and unfixable in terms of efficiency. It's like watching an old man still try to dance like when he was young. Maybe there are echoes of his youth but all the gracefulness is gone. But maybe its function these days is more of a jobs program.

> More that NASA may be past its sell-by date and unfixable in terms of efficiency.

I don't see it that way, but again, to a large extent they're hamstrung by the stupid shit they are required to do by congress. The same agency that has to somehow shepherd the SLS or keep the ISS running alongside the Russians, all just ridiculous political stuff, also ought to get credit for making incredible probes and landers and running the missions that let them do real exploration and scientific study. When NASA gets to do what it's really meant to do, it excels.

Right after that quote:

"The key is ensuring that any future cuts at NASA are not indiscriminate. If and when Jared Isaacman is confirmed by the US Senate as the next NASA administrator, it will be up to him and his team to make the programmatic decisions about which parts of the agency are carrying their weight and which are being carried, which investments carry NASA into the future, and which ones drag it into the past. If these future cuts are smart and position NASA for the future, this could all be worth it. If not, then the beloved agency that dares to explore may never recover."

NASA is a public service agency which literally makes no money or profit - by design.

What are they even on?

Ketamine.

If there is "bloat" in NASA's budget, then the first thing to do is to identify those projects which don't make sense, then Congress decides to cut the money for those projects, then you let go of the personnel working on them if they're not needed for other projects.

That is definitely _not_ what is happening here.

Also, if NASA were forced to drop SLS, that would make it reliant on Falcon Heavy, which coincidentally is made by the person in charge of cutting NASA's budget.

Certainly you jest.

Years away from launching = 14 months for the fly around, and about 24 for the moon landing.

The gateway’s odd orbit makes complete sense. It lets you move cargo to and from the moon’s gravity well without paying to move the rocket fuel and propellant out of the gravity well. This should be obvious to anyone that understood introductory physics and calculus. Have those been lumped in with “controversial theories” like global warming now?

Also, let’s look at how realistic the alternative plan is:

Trump and Elon plan to have a person on mars by the end of this administration. The transit time is 2 years, so they need to launch in the next 21 months.

> so they need to launch in the next 21 months.

So right after FSD and Tesla robo-taxis?

> The gateway’s odd orbit makes complete sense. It lets you move cargo to and from the moon’s gravity well without paying to move the rocket fuel and propellant out of the gravity well.

Explain.

The only bright side here is that the grossly over-subsidized regime of Alabama, where the local economy is 95% government science "overhead", is going to get kicked in the face by DOGE boot, and no state deserves it more.

To your point, this may trigger AL Congress Critters. I see that as a good thing, if we're going to have to suffer under President Musk and Princess Trump.

The propaganda machine has ensure there is no way those AL congress critters can defect without being destroyed.

Repubs have already complained about the [potential] job losses in other areas.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-doge-republicans-mike-...

Things like the SLS exist because of Congress critters on both sides of the aisle keep propping it up, no matter how much NASA doesn't want it. SLS isn't some NASA pet-project.

They can complain all they want. Fear of the propaganda machine will keep them in line. Actions/votes are what matter, and I’m pretty sure you know what is going to happen there.

This isn’t the game they want to think it is, as some folks are starting to realize. And others have been yelling about for years.

Hunstville, AL tends to vote Blue [0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alabama_House_of_Represen...

Mostly a boundary effect of where the lines are drawn and where the Black people live. Anyway the time of "voting blue" has passed.

AL already got smacked with the NIH cuts. 15% indirect cost is ridiculously low and will basically shut down all research at big universities.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/12/trump-universities-...

>According to sources, about 750 employees at NASA accepted the "fork in the road" offer to take deferred resignation from the space agency later this year. This sounds like a lot of people, but generally about 1,000 people leave the agency every year, so effectively, many of these people might just be getting paid to leave jobs they were already planning to exit from.

The culling of "probationary" employees will be more impactful. As it has done at other federal agencies, the Trump administration is generally firing federal employees who are in the "probationary" period of their employment, which includes new hires within the last one or two years or long-time employees who have moved into or been promoted into a new position. About 1,000 or slightly more employees at NASA were impacted by these cuts.

Just in case anyone thinks this could tighten up performance, the layoffs are being targeted at the most mobile and the best.

They're just firing the people they can legally fire.

The normal approach is to go through the agency’s programs, look at each one’s performance, and to cancel the things that aren’t working out.

Among other things, that gets rid of stuff that’s dominated by low performers.

Firing only the people that can find another job or that were recently hired does the opposite, which is why this is both illegal and unprecedentedly stupid.

They can lay off people legally - Clinton laid off hundreds of thousands of federal employees over 8 years - it's just that laying off non-probationary employees takes time and effort and they don't want to spend the time. And, unlike probationary employees, if they choose to save time when firing people by breaking the law, the non-probationary employees have legal recourse.

They can't legally do what they're doing now, they are just counting on the fact that it's very difficult for probationary employees to appeal the illegal firings. Probationary employees can be terminated for performance, but the government legally has to actually show how it concluded that the employee was underperforming. They are not doing this - they are firing people regardless of whether they had good or bad performance reviews or even if they weren't around long enough to have a performance review at all. However, probationary employees have very limited rights to appeal (they can only appeal to MSPB if they allege they were fired for partisan political reasons or for merit status) and Trump now controls MSPB anyway, so they are just counting on the employees not having a way to actually get legal redress even though the firings were illegal.

https://www.mspb.gov/appeals/infosheets/Probationary_Employe...

> it's just that laying off non-probationary employees takes time and effort and they don't want to spend the time

My guess is that they're doing that too, it just takes longer time.

Like every other decimation that's happened, it will be whatever is politically expedient and have nothing to do with need, skill, capabilities, or job performance.

The real cuts are comming when the debt ceiling is threatening a goverment shutdown, which will then allow the introduction of "emergency measures" vs it's our budget and we have the legal right to bankrupt the country

Would be interesting to see if SpaceX headcount grows in near future.

ESA is hiring: https://jobs.esa.int/

Pretty funny all these comments about something that didn't happen.

Spacex will be 6% larger

10% seems pretty innocuous to me.

Letting go of all probationary employees (hired in the last year) is precisely the wrong way to do any of this.

I suspect we will also be hearing about the long time experts that are the only ones who maintain or know about certain systems being rehired desperately..

DOGE is frankly ruining the reputations of Silicon Valley and software engineers in a way I didn’t think possible.. they’re being very stupid about what they’re doing.

I take you haven't seen what SV execs have been doing or saying for the last decade to think this is what is going to ruin their reputations.

Ruining more you mean? Techbros did it to themselves and the rest of us too.

You don't hire 22 year olds to do hard work. You hire them and inflate their ego so they will do things they shouldn't, without question. Maybe not there yet (?) But I fully expect these kids to do some highly illegal shit that will land them in prison or worse.

They are effectively a meat shield for Elon who is a meat shield for Trump who ignores the courts anyway.

Silicon Valley and it's executives ruined their own reputations. DOGE is going on a bigger scale and ruining the United States and the federal government. SV execs think they can play god and do whatever they want, that they're the chosen few. Simply firing the probationary workers in every department has to be one of the stupidest things to ever happen to this country.

The big tech companies seem to mostly be aligning with this stuff.

However, historically, SV’s strength has been that startups fly under the radar of the east coast, so they can bypass the corruption holding the rest of the country back.

I hope this is one of those times, because every time I check the news, another democratic or capitalist institution has been gutted or defected.

well... that's not good.

...unless you're in competition with them.

My thoughts exactly. :(

SpaceX et. al. aren't really in competition with NASA. NASA's job is to discover and explore, not lift Joe's or the NSA's sat to LEO.

depends where you're looking — they'd definitely be in competition for engineering jobs

also NASA definitely does collaborative work with other agencies, including the CIA

This is not the reason that Musk is destroying these agencies. He is a right-wing accelerationist who believes he will rule like a warlord over the ashes of America.

So far, can you say he’s going to be wrong?

Yes, because they're doing blanket firings rather than audits.

Why would that matter for the stated goal?

oh not sure, just pointing out that he's lying about the reason he's doing it so we're just guessing

All of this while the idiots are pushing a $4.5T in tax cuts. Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism will be the downfall of capitalism itself.

Musk and Trump are like a new team owner in professional sports who decides to save money by firing their entire minor league system, except with way more pettiness and spite.

But hey, Musk gets to keep eliminating everyone who might exercise oversight on his companies or business activities, so it's all good right?

Is Space X going to be getting at least 10% less per day?

They are at $8 Million a day from governement I think I read?

So privatize the profits, socialize the costs?

Is this still happening or are they going to write off everything now not exclusively white men as ZOMG DEI

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65165845

Plenty of white men are being fired today.

I guarantee you the vast majority of them support DEI programs too.

Ah yes I certainly didn't mean it that way but rather those return-to-moon missions

This is an absolutely insane way to do things.

And the worst part is even if the courts finally rule this was an abuse of power weeks from now it may be too late, you can't undelete people like webpages (and then there is the matter if such rulings will be obeyed)

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