NASA’s work force is shrinking by about 4,000
The number of NASA employees that have accepted the Trump offer to leave has now grown to more than 4,000 people, reducing the entire workforce from 18,000 to 14,000.
Nearly 4,000 employees, or more than 20% of NASA’s workforce, have applied to leave the agency, NASA confirmed to CBS News Friday. About 3,870 employees have applied to depart NASA over two rounds through the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, NASA disclosed. The deadline for applications to the program is midnight Friday.
With those deferred resignations, NASA’s civil servant workforce would shrink from about 18,000 to 14,000 personnel. This figure also includes about 500 employees who were lost through normal attrition, the agency said.
It is certain that while Trump is office these workers will not be replaced. While most of the press and pro-government activists will claim this is terrible news, it is actually the best thing that can happen. Since NASA is now trying to use the capitalism model across the board, it doesn’t need that many employees. It is hiring the private sector to do most of its work. It doesn’t take that many people to review and issue a contract.
So, even if Congress rejects Trump’s proposed 24% cut to NASA’s 2026 budget and funds it entirely at the same levels as in 2025, the money will be more effectively used.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The number of NASA employees that have accepted the Trump offer to leave has now grown to more than 4,000 people, reducing the entire workforce from 18,000 to 14,000.
Nearly 4,000 employees, or more than 20% of NASA’s workforce, have applied to leave the agency, NASA confirmed to CBS News Friday. About 3,870 employees have applied to depart NASA over two rounds through the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, NASA disclosed. The deadline for applications to the program is midnight Friday.
With those deferred resignations, NASA’s civil servant workforce would shrink from about 18,000 to 14,000 personnel. This figure also includes about 500 employees who were lost through normal attrition, the agency said.
It is certain that while Trump is office these workers will not be replaced. While most of the press and pro-government activists will claim this is terrible news, it is actually the best thing that can happen. Since NASA is now trying to use the capitalism model across the board, it doesn’t need that many employees. It is hiring the private sector to do most of its work. It doesn’t take that many people to review and issue a contract.
So, even if Congress rejects Trump’s proposed 24% cut to NASA’s 2026 budget and funds it entirely at the same levels as in 2025, the money will be more effectively used.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
As long as none of them are welders–we need more of those guys.
Experience with such voluntary workforce downsizing programs at other entities, both governmental and private sector, tends to suggest the main takers are a mix of those nearest retirement and those whose skills and track record – or youth and comparatively low salary level – make them best able to land on their feet and remain ambulatory. The proportion of slackers, drones, timeservers and incompetents in the remaining workforce will, correspondingly rise. That won’t be good for NASA, but the non-imminent-retirees thus re-entering the job market will be a boon to space-related start-ups, of which there appear to be more popping up by the day. Just one more way space capitalism will advance while governmental space recedes.
You forget about the bosses sons across America—you don’t need DEI to produce slackers.
Usually DEI and the sons of management both make good folks throw up their hands and walk out.
The things I’ve heard over a Motorola…
Jeff Wright,
Nepotism, to the extent it is still a problem, seems to be much more of a problem at well-established – too well-established – companies such as the Motorola you reference. Add all of the legacy aerospace contractors to that list as well. These are also the sorts of places where idiot managements, long-used to licking the boots of politicians, were more than willing to embrace DEI for brownie points in certain quarters regardless of the destruction it wreaked within their own organizations. Now that embrace of DEI no longer garners favor in DC, these same weathervanes are proving just as willing to dump DEI overnight.
These are not, in general, problems that plague start-ups. Most start-up founders are barely old enough to have wives, never mind adult children of dubious capability to inflict on their workforces. There is also, in recent times, far less of an expectation that any of a founder’s offspring will eventually “take over the firm.” That’s one more dysfunctional aspect of 20th-century smokestack industrial culture that seems all but gone in these modern, more authentically competitive, times.
The fact that you still seem to think this is a consequential thing is probably just part and parcel of your tendency to view everything through invincibly 1960s-colored lenses.
They had more of a can-do spirit than many of today’s bunch.
I refuse to let anyone under 40 work on my car. I can tell when a serpentine is about to go by sound. A brat at Express Oil Change thought the noise was from my car being old.
Companies may not be as fast to dump feel-good policies as needed..
I am the polar opposite of someone who wears rose colored glasses….folks that do—I wonder about:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optimists-are-alike-but-pessimists-are-unique-bran-scan-study-suggests/
I don’t trust folks who smile too much.
In rockets—I want size and simplicity.
We are always going to have solids—so that recent test has NorGrum on noticed. I don’t like Boeing, but reckon it is easier to get just four hydrolox to work one bloody time than to teach water towers to flip like Nadia Comaneci.
Beginning in the eighties, IBM began dealing with its widespread bureaucracies by offering its inhabitants financial incentives to leave. I took one of the offers to leave IBM, doing so well before I had planned. I had “better” things to do and I chose to do them.
During these corporate programs, there was a common understanding within the bowels of the bureaucracies with which I was most familiar. As the end date approached, whereby employees were required to have notified their respective management of their intentions, and such information spread, a commonly understood sad – but hilarious, “theme” emerged.
It became widely understood that qualified employees who chose to take IBM’s offer should have the offer rescinded! Qualified employees who chose NOT to take it should be terminated! IBM was seemingly most-often shedding its valued employees while retaining the reason for the programs in the first place!
A lot of ideas floated by suits backfire…be they from IBM or fed-gov types.
Dave Walden,
I was quite familiar with the IBM of the 70s and 80s from the customer side. Like Bell Labs and Xerox, their R&D was first rate, but the suits of that era didn’t understand any of it and it was always people who left those places and went out on their own who made money on the stuff while the big guys were still scratching their heads.
Thanks for backing my thesis with a concrete example.
Jeff Wright,
A lot more of the 60s-era “go-getters” seemed to want to be suits at extant firms than to start their own. The idea of entrepreneurship being normative for go-getters didn’t really take hold until the 70s and 80s. It continues.
I don’t trust people who smile inappropriately.
In rockets, I want size and reusability. As Einstein famously said, “A thing should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
We are always going to have solids – for ICBMs and tactical missiles. For space launch, not so much. Reusability is the future of space launch. SRBs are antithetical to reusability. There is no future for solids larger than an ICBM’s first stage.
I think Henry Spencer once said “Solids are a branch of fireworks, not rocketry”.
The solids on SLS have a lot to do with the high mass of the escape system on the Orion capsule. Whole program is a kludge that should never have been started.
Dave Walden,
I once worked with a guy who explained how a large company divests itself of its best employees:
A large project gets into trouble, and the payroll for that project must be reduced to pay for outside help (or the government customer has slowed the work in order to “save” its own budget). Management gets rid of the lowest performers, and most of them are able to find work on other projects within the company.
Then the project gets into more trouble, and the mediocre workers have to be removed, but most other positions in the company are already filled, so many of these workers go out the door.
Then the project gets cancelled, but there are hardly any open positions left inside the company, so most of the best workers go out the door.
Repeat on the next project that gets into trouble.
Now this news is quite odd
“A new Northwestern study analyzing public records maintained by the U.S. Government Publishing Office and Congressional Budget Office over a 40-year period showed that federal science and research accounts received more funding when Republicans controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and the presidency, as opposed to their Democratic counterparts.”
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-republicans-fund-science-democrats.html
Yet you have this:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-donation-agency.html
My guess is that the study includes technology–and the study goes back awhile.
John Culberson’s support for Europa, Bush 41’s SEI…maybe that skewed things…but
“The current administration’s posture towards science and science funding is a pretty stark departure from prior funding commitments by Republicans to science, according to our research,” Furnas said. “By illuminating these dynamics, this paper offers a foundation for more effective science advocacy and policy design. It underscores the importance of framing science funding as a bipartisan priority that advances shared societal goals, while also calling for vigilance to protect science from political interference.”