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.
We literally successfully completed the first flight test for Ares I. We absolutely had a replacement. They canceled it as soon as we built it and started the SLS program. We successfully launched SLS with an almost perfect mission around the moon. Now, just guess what the gov is doing. …cancelling SLS. It might go a few more flights, but Trump canceled the program already. It’s not that we don’t build and successfully fly. It’s that they pull the rug out from under our feet as soon as we’re successful.