The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut at least 2,145 high-ranking Nasa employees with specialized skills or management responsibilities.
According to documents obtained by Politico, most employees leaving are in senior-level government ranks, depriving the agency of decades of experience as part of a push to slash the size of the federal government through early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.
The documents indicate that 1,818 of the staff currently serve in core mission areas, like science or human space flight, while the others work in mission support roles including information technology, or IT.
Asked about the proposed cuts, agency spokesperson Bethany Stevens told Reuters: “NASA remains committed to our mission as we work within a more prioritized budget.”
Since Trump returned to office in January, planning in the US space industry and among Nasa’s workforce of 18,000 people has been thrown into chaos by the layoffs and proposed budget cuts for fiscal year 2026 that would cancel dozens of science programs.
Last week, seven former heads of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate signed a joint letter to Congress condemning the White House’s proposed 47% cuts to Nasa science activities in its 2026 budget proposal. In the letter, the former officials urged the House appropriations committee “to preserve US leadership in space exploration and reject the unprecedented cuts to space science concocted by the White House’s Budget Director, Russ Vought”.
“The economics of these proposed cuts ignore a fundamental truth: investments in NASA science have been and are a powerful driver of the U.S. economy and technological leadership,” the letter read. “In our former roles leading NASA’s space science enterprise, we consistently saw skilled teams innovate in the face of seemingly impossible goals, including landing a car-sized rover on Mars with pinpoint precision, build a massive telescope that can unfold in the vacuum of space to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, design and operate a spacecraft hardy enough to survive temperatures of many thousands of degrees at the Sun, inspiring young and old alike worldwide by the stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and pioneering the use of small satellites for science.”
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They also warned that the cuts threatened to cede US leadership to China: “Global space competition extends far past Moon and Mars exploration. The Chinese space science program is aggressive, ambitious, and well-funded. It is proposing missions to return samples from Mars, explore Neptune, monitor climate change for the benefit of the Chinese industry and population, and peer into the universe – all activities that the FY 2026 NASA budget proposal indicates the US will abandon.”
Nasa also remains without a confirmed administrator, since the Trump administration abruptly withdrew its nominee, the billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, in an apparent act of retaliation against Elon Musk, who had proposed his nomination.
In a social media post attacking Musk on Sunday, Trump wrote that he thought it would have been thought “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life”.