In a move more reminiscent of a struggling local newspaper than the world’s premier space exploration agency, NASA has started asking employees if they’d like to choose to leave. Per Space.com, a June 9 memo lays out a few ways that personnel can do so, including buyouts, early retirements, and deferred resignations. For the latter, employees would be able to stop working within the next two weeks, but still get paid through the end of the year.
This all comes just a few weeks after the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal for the federal government writ large, which among much else includes a full 24% funding cut for NASA. If passed, that would be the biggest annual cut the agency has ever suffered. Contained within that is a goal to slash NASA staff by 32%, to around 12,000. It also includes a whopping 47% cut to the agency’s scientific activities.
One-third fewer employees, only half as much science, and one-quarter less total budget: It adds up to a gutting of one of America’s most beloved institutions. According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2023, 69% of Americans said that it was “essential” for the U.S. to remain a leader in space exploration. Kind of hard to do that without enough staff or budget.
NASA in the early Trump 2.0 administration
It’s been rough going for the space agency since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January. Already reeling from multiple rounds of layoffs in 2024,particularly at its Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, the agency had the rug pulled out from under its feet when the Trump administration canceled the lease for the headquarters of its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). While the staff have been promised their work will continue in a new “virtual” institute, GISS itself will be dissolved.
Just this week, NASA also announced it would be significantly scaling back its social media presence. At the same time, the reduced budget specifically targets the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which NASA was originally planning to use to get astronauts back to the Moon as part of its Artemis program. It’s even looking to privatize astronaut retrieval.
All together, the space agency has effectively been knocked off its trajectory and is in a bit of a spin at the moment. One hopes that NASA can, as it has famously done before, rescue itself mid-disaster, charting a new course with vastly reduced resources. Still, doing that will require a great crew. Question is, how many of that crew will be taking buyouts first.
