(Image credit: Space.com / Marilyn Perkins, with contributions from Josh Dinner)

NASA’s flagship center for space science is under attack from within, and some of the biggest losses appear to be happening behind the curtain of the government shutdown.

Throughout the summer of 2025, Space.com interviewed nearly a dozen current and formerNASA workers and reviewed several internal agency communications in an investigation into allegations of unlawful activity by NASA leadership — allegations supported in arecent report by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The conclusion: NASA has been prematurely and illegally implementing the President’s 2026 budget request before Congress finalizes funding.

The workforce at NASA’sGoddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, say this has put groundbreaking missions at risk, and is degrading roadblocks designed to safeguard human lives. Now, under the cloak of a closed U.S. government, nearly half the GSFC campus — the hub of NASA science — is marked for abandonment.

Shiftingpolicies on diversity, science and education that began at the start of Trump’s second term havehit Goddard especially hard. Priorities outlined in the White House’s fiscal year 2026 (FY26) budget request in May, which has yet to be approved by Congress, were embraced as if it were already law by GSFC leadership, who have been preemptively reorganizing center staff and facilities since its release.

Goddard has a target on its back

Goddard has worked on some of NASA’s most iconic space science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, which continue to provide groundbreaking astronomical discoveries, and OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample-return mission. It’s also where NASA is tackling ambitious new missions like theNancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, theLaser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to detect gravitational waves and measure ripples in space-time, and the Venus atmospheric probeDAVINCI.

GSFC hosts thelargest single concentration of researchers in the NASA workforce, encompassing the agency’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD). Nearly 10,000 scientists and engineers work at Goddard in total, around 7,000 of whom are employed through NASA contractors. Center staff said they felt what they perceived as the new administration’s vitriol for science early on.

“The atmosphere, from my perspective, at least, has been incredibly dark and depressing,” Goddard astrophysicist Casey McGrath toldSpace.com, clarifying that he was not speaking on behalf of NASA or his agency contract employer. “I feel like the people I work with, myself included, have just been demoralized, exhausted, terrified, frustrated and angry, for months and months on end with no pause whatsoever.”

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The internal cultures of NASA centers across the country have evolved to align, at least in part, with the political leanings of their respective locales. With Goddard based in a Democratic state under a Republican administration, many there feel as though the space center is being singled out.

Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the space science and exploration advocacy nonprofit The Planetary Society, explained the divideduring a Sept. 18 livestream about NASA’s ongoing budget saga.

“There’s been a really notable divergence and concentration within NASA, almost purely by a historical accident of its major internal directorates and responsibilities, where human spaceflight NASA centers have become very solidly Republican represented, at least at the state level, and NASA science centers have become very Democratic represented at the state level,” Dreier said.

“My title is Research Physical Scientist ... even though I’m actually a climate scientist. Apparently the c-word just sets some people off.”

— Claire

It’s a perception shared by many Goddard employees. “Claire,” who asked that her real name remain anonymous for fear of retribution, is a climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) — a branch of the Maryland campus that, until earlier this year, occupied a building on the Columbia University campus in New York City. While her primary focus is on climate science, Claire’s official title is Research Physical Scientist. She referred to “climate” as the “c-word,”** **and a term she and her colleagues constantly felt the need to talk around, rather than say outright.

“It does feel like there is an overlap between the political party in charge of your NASA center and how your NASA center is faring right now,” Claire said. “Goddard is a science-based center with a lot of engineers, and a lot of their missions are canceled out (in the President’s budget request). It’s taking a huge hit to the civil service workforce. It does feel like Goddard is now being singled out.”

In January 2025, former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stepped down from the position ahead of Trump’s inauguration, making way for the appointment ofKennedy Space Center DirectorJanet Petro as the agency’s acting administrator. Petro wastasked with steering NASA’s early transition period.

At Goddard, Segrid Harris was appointed ETD director in January and began enforcing rigid expectations that many staff saw as a cultural break from NASA norms.

After that, “the mood started changing almost immediately,” Rose Ferreira, a former Goddard spaceflight analyst who wasabruptly laid off duringSpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s early DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) sweep through the federal workforce, told Space.com. “The language that was being used in some of our internal emails was so aggressive. I’ve never seen anything like this from NASA,” Ferreira said at the time.

“I think they know that what they’re doing shouldn’t be put in writing.”

— Wendy

“[Harris] was brought in from the Air Force, and she is very strict on the chain of command, and basically is implementing what center management is telling her to do,” said “Wendy,” a Goddard spacecraft engineer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, in an interview.

“When we had DOGE coming on site, we had some supervisors saying that if DOGE asks you for access to your laptop, you should give it to them. Basically, just hand over the keys,” Wendy said. “That direction was implied to come from Engineering management, but not put in writing.”

“It’s really hard for us to get anything in writing from Engineering management, because I think they know that what they’re doing shouldn’t be put in writing,” she added.

Another GSFC civil servant who asked to remain anonymous, “Peter,” said that’s by design. “Goddard management is very good at obfuscating its intentions directly, either through refusal to put any directives in writing or by working through chain of command, such that decisions don’t necessarily reflect back on the individual who ultimately made them.” Peter spoke with Space.com about ongoing building closures taking place at Goddard’s Greenbelt campus, but months before, GISS was identified as the first in a chain of dominos to be knocked down.

GISS: The first to fall

By March, NASA wasimplementing workforce reductions and closing offices (such as the Office of the Chief Scientist and the Office of Technology, Policy & Strategy). Internal speculation about NASA’s future painted a bleak picture for Goddard and its programs. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of NASA’s climate science programs was beingunderscored nationally, as former agency leadership raised the alarm.

“The first person that was fired at NASA … was the Chief Scientist and Chief Climate Officer,” Nelsonsaid during an event in Washington, D.C. in April. “I think we need to be concerned about that.”

That concern, it seems, was warranted. Later that month, GISS employees wereordered to vacate their Columbia University building (which many may recognize as the one with the corner diner in the show Seinfeld). Since then, they’ve been forced to work remotely — at a time when the government was doling outreturn-to-office mandates — preventing access to labs and crippling the center’s mission of embedding NASA climate scientists within international academia. Though the closure came as a shock, the reasoning behind it seemed obvious to those on the ground.

The NASA GISS building in New York City. (Image credit: NASA)

“We have one of the original models for climate simulation,” Claire explained. GISS develops and maintains research on atmospheric composition and long-termclimate change, and manages NASA’s global surface temperature record — one of the world’s key climate datasets.

“We have the ignoble distinction now of being the second NASA center ever closed down,” Claire said. NASA’s Electronics Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the first,shuttered in 1970 due to budget cuts during the restructuring of theApollo program.

Jim Green, a formerNASA Chief Scientist who retired in 2022 after 42 years at the agency, told Space.com that stewardship of that climate research requires a significant undertaking.

“The huge Earth science workforce at Goddard analyzes an enormous amount of Earth science data that comes in … That requires quite a cadre of very knowledgeable people,” Green said. “Not only the project scientists and the scientists analyzing the data coming from those missions, but also the scientists that are managing multi-mission analysis. That’s particularly true in Earth science.”

Green said climate and Earth science have a big footprint at NASA. “Earth science in particular has a huge, huge infrastructure analyzing our Earth satellites. So I think they, of course, have been hit disproportionately because of the approach the administration is taking,” he said.

The move out of the GISS building was chaotic. Equipment for one NASA mission,PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) — a satellitelaunched in February 2024 that measures the health of Earth’s oceans — had to be hurriedly moved between agency sites to avoid program setbacks.

“There was about, I don’t know, a million dollars worth of [PACE] equipment,” Claire estimated. “They told us to get out of the building … So the PI (principal investigator) rented a car, and he put all of the stuff in the car and drove through the night to put it on another NASA facility so that it’d be safe.”

Stacks of boxes containing files from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies being moved into storage. (Image credit: Joanna Thompson/Future)

GISS’s position on a university campus allowed for a unique relationship between the facility and academia. Onlyabout a third of the people who work at GISS are federal employees or federal contractors. The other two-thirds work for Columbia and other universities. “They are those soft-money scientists who are totally supported by those federal research grants,” Claire said.

“They didn’t fire us, but they didn’t have to fire us,” Claire said. “All they have to do is stop putting money into federal research grants, and it will have the same impact without any of the stop measures that you have for the federal civil service. Those do not exist in the academic community for the federal research grants.”

While they still have work to do, their ability to do it is being siloed. “When it comes to doing cutting-edge science, having a little bit of face time goes a really long way,” Claire explained. “The cross talk, the back-and-forth that you cannot have during Zoom meetings — during face-to-face meetings, you can. You actually make a lot of progress,” she said. “That’s all gone. And so this piece of our mission, which was to be integrated into the academic community — we’ve been cut off at our knees.”

Claire usedClimate Week NYC, an event celebrated at the end of September, as an example of opportunities missed as a result of the new constraints. “There are people coming to New York City from across the world,” she said at the time. “If we still had our facility and that was happening, we would have dozens of meetings leveraging our conference centers on site, so that we could be true to our mission … Now, we’re scrambling just to find a space.”

Closing GISS may have also violated NASA’s agreement with Claire’s employee union. Claire is a member ofGESTA, the Goddard Engineers, Scientists and Technicians Association. GESTA operates under the umbrella of IFPTE, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and advocates for NASA employees’ rights, working conditions and policies.

“As a civil servant, I had a collective bargaining agreement that said certain things had to happen before there could be a change in working conditions,” Claire said. “My collective bargaining agreement was totally ignored when they kicked us out of our building with just a month’s notice.”

Today, the GISS building presumably still sits empty, with NASA apparently continuing to foot the bill.

“The super has told us the building is not rented out,” Claire said. “He thinks it’s still being paid for. They’re not showing it off to anyone else.”

In retrospect, Claire wondered if GISS was a test case for closures at Goddard that came months later, and are happening now.

“They are closing down a significant part of the Goddard campus, and so I think that we [at GISS] were singled out to be the first one to get poked,” she said. “In general, Goddard is not a favorite amongst the NASA centers.”

NASA’s budget eviscerated

Days after GISS employees were given notice to vacate their building, the White House released the FY26 Presidential Budget Request (PBR). It proposed a historic 24% cut to overall NASA funding and slashed the money for space agency science programs by 47%.

Experts called the cuts catastrophic, saying they waste billions in federal investments and gut groundbreaking missions.

“Three words that we’ve been using to describe this: unprecedented, unstrategic and wasteful — wasteful of the taxpayers’ investment,” Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, said during theSept. 18 livestream. The Planetary Society has lobbied to restore NASA’s budget in Congress’s appropriations bill since the budget request’s publication, whichcancels 41 planned or already active science missions, including functioning spacecraft operating inEarth orbit and beyond.

Dreier called it an “extinction-level event.”

“This isn’t just poor policy — it’s fundamentally wasteful and inefficient, exactly what this Administration is saying it does not want,” Dreier told Space.com in June. “When you abruptly terminate projects that are already in development, or well-functioning projects operating for pennies on the proverbial dollar, you’re essentially throwing away all the previous investment while gaining nothing in return.”

“The operating missions cancellations alone represent over $12 billion of invested taxpayer value. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. It would take years and many millions more to replace them,” he added.

Another casualty of the FY26 budget request was NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement (OSTEM), which was completely eliminated from the space agency’s portfolio. OSTEM was responsible for NASA’s educational outreach and student involvement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.

“That not only has an effect on what we do at NASA in terms of workforce development, but also kids across the entire country,” said Julie, an agency employee who did not wish to give her last name, told Space.com during a worker-organizeddemonstration to protest agency science cuts in July. She was not authorized to speak on behalf of NASA.

Julie listed programs like grad school scholarships and teacher training initiatives that will be lost in OSTEM’s absence. “If that’s something that goes away completely, it’s going to impact the entire next generation of students,” she said.

Demonstrators across from the Air and Space Smithsonian protest cuts to NASA science missions, July 20, 2025. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

“We’re not talking about delays in scientific exploration. We’re talking about the end of it.”

— Bill Nye, Planetary Society CEO

Since the FY26 budget request’s release, pushback has been sharp. Employees at Goddard under the bannerNASA Needs Help organized three public protests over the summer, and have joined organizations like the Planetary Society and lawmakers to call on Congress to restore NASA’s funding.

At an Oct. 5day of action on Capitol Hill hosted by the Planetary Society, CEO Bill Nye outlined the stakes. “Fully functioning spacecraft summarily turned off, development work on virtually every future science mission summarily halted. We’re not talking about delays in scientific exploration. We’re talking about the end of it,” he said.

Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye addresses press and supporters on Capitol Hill on Oct. 5, 2025. (Image credit: Planetary Society)

To his relief and others,Congress is pushing back on the proposed cuts.

The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a measure to fund NASA at a level comparable to fiscal year 2025, and there isbipartisan support for maintaining the space agency’s science programs. But many whoprotested over the summer worry that irreparable damage has already occurred, and is being accelerated by the government shutdown.

Part of that fear is due to the perception that whatever Congress signs into law won’t matter. Employees assume the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will illegally impound funds anyway. Some think it’s already happening. “People expect that to continue,” said Wendy, the Goddard engineer. “So they don’t trust that Congress’s budget will actually be implemented even after it’s passed.”

Lawmakers, too, have voiced skepticism about OMB’s actions. In anop-ed published Aug. 5, Republican Representative Brian Babin, of Texas’s 36th district, wrote, “Although Congress is working to ensure NASA has what it needs, the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed budget doesn’t align with Mr. Trump’s directives. To be blunt: OMB needs to start rowing in the same direction. We don’t have time for budget games.”

Kiraly, with the Planetary Society, thinks there’s a deeper motivation behind OMB fighting the tide: OMB Director Russell Vought.

“This is not the President’s budget. This is not Congress’s budget. This isn’t even secretary Sean Duffy’s, who’s serving as the acting Administrator of NASA (since replacing Petro in July). This is Russ Vought’s budget,” Kiraly said during the Planetary Society livestream.

Vought, Kiraly said, has it out for NASA. “He is somebody that historically has not seen a lot of value in space science … who does not believe that the government should be investing in space exploration or space science,” he said. “And we know that because just a couple years ago, he very muchwrote this exact thing. He wants to propose a 50% reduction to NASA Science.”

Dreier agreed. “The problem with the OMB,” he said, “is not just that they can control the flow of money. They control the rate of spending in addition to preparing these budget requests. So even if you provide them the money, they can throw in a decent number of internal bureaucratic hurdles or slow-walk the pace at which this goes out.”

Early enforcement

The debate over the budget and implementation legalities is still taking place months later. Very quickly after the FY26 budget request’s release, however, NASA leadership started sending messages to staff about reshaping the agency in that image. They announced organization restructurings, impending reductions in force (RIFs) and encouraged space agency employees to take advantage of Deferred Resignation Programs (DRPs).

In a June 9 email obtained by Space.com, Petro instructed staff to start implementing changes to reflect “the Administration’s priorities.”

“While it is moving through the legislative process, the proposed funding requires action now,” the email states. In bold, Petro listed three different programs available to employees who wanted to do their part in thinning NASA’s workforce: the agency’s DRP, Voluntary Early Retirement (VERA) and a Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP).

Emails from June 9 and 12 show an insistence by NASA leadership to adhere to President Trump’s 2026 budget request. (Image credit: obtained by Space.com)

“We’re already seeing the agency is moving to put in motion things that are laid out in the President’s budget request, even though Congress hasn’t weighed in yet, because they think it’s clear that that is the direction we’re ultimately going to be heading in,” McGrath said in July.

That observation was shared by others at Goddard. “The reason a lot of management says that we have to plan for the President’s budget request, as opposed to Congress’s budget, is because they believe that the President will impound the funds even if Congress passes a budget,” Wendy said.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, saidwhat’s happening at NASA is illegal. A Democratic staff report released by Cantwell and the Committee on Sept. 29, titled “The Destruction of NASA’s Mission,” says NASA’s preemptive compliance with the PBR is an “unconstitutional plot to gut the agency” and circumvents Congress’s authority.

“The President’s proposed budget … carries no force of law, cannot override existing spending laws, and has no legal impact on funding appropriated by Congress,” the report says.

“Losing hundreds of NASA scientists and experts with irreplaceable experience — especially at Goddard — as well as permanently shuttering labs, one-of-a-kind equipment and entire buildings, causes irreversible disruptions to core scientific research that will last far into the future and undermine the United States’ global leadership position,” Cantwell told Space.com in a statement.

“We will not win the space race in the long run without fully funding NASA’s science mission,” she added.

Duffy namedAmit Kshatriya as NASA associate administrator Sept. 3. After the report’s release, Kshatriya unequivocally denied its claims.

(Image credit: Space.com / Marilyn Perkins, with contributions from Josh Dinner)

“This report is false,” Kshatriya said in a statement to Space.com. “NASA has communicated openly and transparently with Congress that we continue to execute our available appropriated funding in accordance with established fiscal policies which respect congressional authorities.”

“NASA will never compromise on safety. The President’s budget request stands with Congress at this point, and NASA will enact the budget appropriated to us,” Kshatriya added.

NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said that the publication of the Senate report was strategic, and politically motivated.

“The intentionally timed release of this inflammatory, false report is nothing more than a distraction tactic from Senate Democrats. As Democrats push to shut our government down, they’re attempting to divert attention,” she told Space.com in a statement.

The Senate’s report supports Space.com’s findings, stating, “as early as June 2025, NASA began ‘implementing immediately’ certain ‘institutional changes’ to align with the President’s proposed budget,” and asserts that NASA Chief of Staff Brian Hughes is conspiring with OMB to “actively implement the President’s FY26 budget request.”

In an internal NASA email obtained for the report, space agency leadership was told, “PBR is the direction. Discretionary funds can be impounded per the Impoundment Act of 1974. If there is a CR (continuing resolution), impoundment is likely going to get on the table as a mechanism to get to the PBR.”

One of the report’s key findings concluded that “OMB Director Russell Vought’s budgetary end game is to use impoundment to illegally implement the President’s proposed budget at NASA, while ignoring congressional funding levels.”

Over the past several months at Goddard, this has been an open secret. “There is just a general acknowledgement that a lot of what is happening is illegal,” Wendy said, “but people have been told to do it, and so they feel like they have to do it. That’s especially true for management, because they’re getting directives from people above them, and if they don’t comply, they will lose their jobs.”

Reduction in force

Through June and July, leadership continued to push DRPs and signaled looming RIFs. Morale at Goddard sank as losses mounted, and the future of different missions hung in limbo.

“We are seeing more and more people taking [the DRP] now while the window is still open. I think that’s kind of because we don’t know what will happen after that window closes, and it might be a worse scenario than the current one,” McGrath said earlier this summer.

Employees in programs that lost their funding in the budget request are preparing to shut off functioning spacecraft. Some of those active missions marked for termination include theChandra X-ray Observatory, which studies high-energy X-ray sources like black holes, theMAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter studying the Martian atmosphere, theJuno probe orbiting Jupiter, which hasat least another three years of life in it, andNew Horizons, which became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto in 2015 and is now exploring the Kuiper Belt beyond.

“Mission leads are being told to plan for their missions to be shut down if they were zeroed out in the President’s budget request, and this includes missions that are already in space and sending back data and have very minimal upkeep. They just want to turn them off,” Wendy said. Meanwhile, NASA leadership tightened their embrace of the budget request.

“The President’s FY 2026 Budget Request for NASA is NASA’s budget request,” Petro wrote in a June 27 email to employees obtained by Space.com. She acknowledges an ultimate budget has yet to be finalized by Congress, but that NASA needs “to begin preparing to align our workforce and resources now to meet the mission priorities [the budget request] outlines.”

Emails from June 27 and July 9 show a continued push by NASA leadership to align the agency with the President’s budget request and encouragement to sign up for the government’s deferred resignation program. (Image credit: obtained by Space.com)

The directive was again echoed down the chain of command in a July 9 email to Goddard engineers obtained by Space.com, which says ETD reorganization plans in development prior to Trump’s second term would be shifted to fit “the vision put forward within the President’s Budget Request for NASA.”

McGrath’s work in astrophysics supports one of the missions zeroed out in the FY26 budget request. After its release, his contract employer wrote to inform him they were unable to guarantee his job past the end of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

“I received an email from my direct employer just acknowledging that elephant in the room,” McGrath said earlier this year. “My NASA sponsor told them I am in a high-risk position right now, and they can’t guarantee anything beyond September 30.”

Before that date passed, McGrath’s contractor was able to extend his position through the end of 2025. Now, the government shutdown has put him and thousands of other contract employees in the awkward position of having to sign on remotely for work, but without many of their coworkers and resources needed to do their jobs.

“I can’t really communicate with my civil servant colleagues and bosses since they are all furloughed,” McGrath said in October. “My weekly meetings are canceled or underattended.” It has continued this way for McGrath and many other contract employees since theshutdown began on Oct. 1.

As some contract employers attempted to be as transparent as possible, NASA’s communication efforts with its own workforce shrank over the course of the year.

A July 17 email obtained by Space.com, sent from one lab chief in a “First Line Supervisor” position, explained that division town halls would be canceled indefinitely and to expect department-wide group chat channels to be disabled. The lab chief said that these changes were made in an effort to funnel information to employees through First Line Supervisors, but was unable to say definitively since official reasoning had not been communicated to that level of management, according to the email.

“In normal times, all agency GSFC [department] town halls were officially recorded, but that was discontinued some months ago, and later most such meetings were stopped entirely,” Marshall Finch, a contract systems administrator at Goddard, told Space.com. He was not authorized to speak on behalf of NASA or his direct employer.

At the same time, word about the uneasiness within the United States’ scientific community had spread worldwide, and many Goddard scientists and engineers began receiving recruitment emails from European research institutions.

Before GSFC town halls ended in the spring, Lystrup mentioned the notion of scientists being recruited for positions overseas to employees on at least one occasion. “With grants drying up, there is going to be less soft money for people to survive on as well,” she said in a June 16 town hall, adding, suggestively, according to Wendy, “I know that there are a number of countries that are actively recruiting US scientists and putting money behind recruiting US scientists to go abroad.”

Speculation circulated that the reason town halls stopped had to do with something Lystrup said that NASA higher-ups didn’t like. Lystrup ended upresigning as GSFC director on July 22.

One group was told they were not allowed to talk to HR or any higher levels of management without first contacting their supervisor. Another email obtained by Space.com reads, in part, “We must do this because: 1) management is directing us to communicate this way.”

An email from July 28 instructs some employees not to directly contact Human Resources. (Image credit: obtained by Space.com)

Finch said the changes in communication have been “chilling.”

“I have spoken to people afraid to put comments and directives in writing. I know people afraid to dissent, or afraid to do so in writing,” Finch said. “Some people feel more vulnerable than others, so we lose their voices as they silence themselves. The result is lost safety and lost productivity.”

As the window to volunteer for a deferred resignation neared its end, NASA employees were forced to make hard decisions about their future. “Because our management is telling us that we have to align to the President’s budget request, people are using it to predict whether or not they will have a job in the next year, and deciding to leave based on that,” Wendy said.

The deadline for NASA employees to opt into the agency’s DRP was July 25. By that time, more than 4,000 people at the space agency hadsigned up to leave, reducing NASA’s employee pool by over 20%. At Goddard,GESTA reported that 447 people chose the DRP route, equating to roughly one in six GSFC civil servants — about 17% of the center’s workforce, totaling more than 11% of NASA’s voluntary departures across its 10 major facilities nationwide — the largest of any agency center.

No one Wendy spoke with who took the DRP actually wanted to leave NASA. “Prior to this year, they really enjoyed their jobs,” she said.

Loss of science and safety

Unpredictable losses from voluntary departures left many Goddard programs with holes in their expertise, growing safety concerns and, in some cases, fractured mission teams that may lack the resources to continue regardless of what final budget is passed.

“Because of our own management reassigning people to other projects, we won’t have enough people on the projects to keep them going, regardless of the funding,” Wendy said.

Former NASA astronaut Terry Virts joined the space agency in 2000. He has flown to space twice, served as commander of theInternational Space Station and spent a cumulative 213 days in orbit. He retired in 2016 but still maintains a residence in Houston, near NASA’sJohnson Space Center, where he keeps in close contact with his past NASA community. Virts is currentlyrunning as a Democrat for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas.

“Once the hardware is canceled, once the scientists are gone, you can’t just start [those missions] up again,” Virts told Space.com in an interview. “Solar system probes require engineers to understand very technical things to work for years on a program. Once you let someone go, you’re not just going to get them back.”

“Anytime you’re doing something as complicated as launching rockets and operating spacecraft inspace, you don’t want turmoil and angst and people quitting on the ground,” Virts said. “The things that are happening are safety issues for NASA, but they’re also safety issues for the other 330 million Americans.”

Virts said that implementing these kinds of cuts to science at NASA and other federal agencies has “absolutely” already cost human lives. He pointed to the July 4Hill Country floods in Texas, when more than 130 people died from the catastrophically rapid rise of the Guadalupe River, which overtook entire communities.

“The one person who was supposed to warn everybody was gone, thanks to this administration’s disastrous cuts,” Virts asserted. Some reports have speculated that the National Weather Service office in Austinlacked a warning coordination meteorologist due to an early retirement tied to federal cuts, and that the person in that position could have potentially activated an earlier alert system for affected residents.

On June 24, just before the Hill Country floods became the latest example of the effects of climate change and natural disasters, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado received word they wouldno longer have access to data provided by satellites that form the US Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The NSIDC has long used this critical information to measure sea ice in real time to inform thesea-ice index, which monitors the amount of ice coverage around Earth’s poles.

The Department of Defense uses those measurements for planning things like ship deployment, but it has long been integrated into NASA’s own Earth science programs, withalgorithms developed at Goddard forming the backbone of the sea-ice concentration datasets. GSFC scientists routinely processed the data to monitor polar climate trends. When access to those feeds was suspended, it didn’t just cut off NSIDC, it alsocut off Goddard’s ability to update the global datasets it maintains for NASA’s climate missions, effectively blinding parts of the agency’s environmental monitoring network.

By then, workers at NASA saw the writing on the wall and began to organize. “A lot of people are starting to realize that the risk to the whole agency is getting greater and greater,” McGrath said in June. “Time is running out. If we don’t say something now, then there’s not going to be much opportunity left going forward.”

NASA workers and supporters across from the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum protest preemptive cuts to Goddard’s programs on July 20, 2025. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

In addition to the NASA Needs Helpdemonstrations over the summer, nearly 300 current and former NASA employees signed the “Voyager Declaration,” which theypublished on July 21. Its signatories included astronauts, scientists and engineers protesting the preemptive funding cuts and employee losses, which, they said, “threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”

The letter invoked “Technical Authority,” anestablished process put in place following investigations into theColumbia andChallenger space shuttle accidents, which establishes employee protections if they speak out against something they view as unsafe.

“I can see another Challenger, another Columbia happening down the road as a result of this...”

— Julie

Goddard’s arm of NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance was hit particularly hard by position losses, according to employees. The department is responsible for ensuring safety protocols are followed through every stage of spacecraft development and testing, and when scientists and engineers interface with potential hazards like high-pressure procedures, vacuum chambers, radioactive materials and heavyweight hardware.

Julie, who attended a July 20 NASA Needs Help“Moon Day” demonstration, worried about the effects on NASA’s Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer. “That was set up after Columbia and Challenger to make sure that we were passing any lessons learned on to the entire community,” she said. “I can see another Challenger, another Columbia happening down the road as a result of this, and it will ultimately be blamed back on us.”

“We build very specific things,” George, a NASA employee who did not wish to provide his last name, told Space.com at the protest. He feared the deterioration of critical expertise and the consequences that could come with it. “If we lose that, we lose that, it’s gone. Where are we going to learn how to do that again? Are we going to have to have another Challenger moment to learn how to do that again? Maybe.”

Employees fear that long-standing safety guardrails are being eroded. “It feels like a lot of the leadership at NASA is undoing a lot of good progress that we’ve made over the past years and decades,” McGrath said. “We’re getting real close, I think, to that moment where it might be too late to undo some of the changes that could happen.”

Duffy briefly touched on these concerns during a Sept. 4 all-agencytown hall livestream. He acknowledged employee feedback about insufficient personnel, but downplayed fears over science losses and safety. “We have Congressionally mandated science, which we’re going to do,” he said, “but we also have a lot of science that is going to drive human exploration, that’s going to drive our mission to the moon. We are going to lean into that science as well.”

“Do we have the human resources available? … As of right now, I think we do,” he said, adding that he was open to reevaluating if an assessment was needed.

“We are safety driven, and we should be safety driven,” Duffy said. “But sometimes we can’t let safety be the enemy of making progress. We have to be able to take some leaps. We have to be able to jump forward in our innovation and drive this mission. And there’s always a balance to that.”

For all the cuts in the FY26 budget request, the Trump administration is doing all it can to bolster human spaceflight programs likeArtemis, NASA’s effort to return astronauts tothe moon. But without a robust scientific portfolio, some at NASA wonder how astronauts will occupy their time during such missions.

“It turns us away from those quests that give our astronauts something to do when they’re doing the exploration, and keeps them safe while they’re doing it. Science enables exploration,” Barbara Cohen, a NASA planetary scientist, said to attendees of aSept. 15 protest outside the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. “We need science to drive the innovation.”

NASA seems to be driving in the opposite direction.

Campus closures begin

Over the last few months, notices have trickled down through supervisors to inform employees at Goddard of several facility closures. A July 1 email to managers, obtained by Space.com, announced the impending closures of the staff fitness facility on the main GSFC campus — marked for Nov. 30 — and the health facilities at both the Greenbelt campus and at NASA’sWallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which operates under Goddard’s umbrella.

Goddard’s health services are in place to address injuries specific to the types of hazards NASA scientists and engineers may face, like exposure to radiation or hypergolic fuels. They also provide physicals and medical assessments required by people’s jobs at the center. “Anticipated budget reductions in Fiscal Year 2026,” was the reason given for the closures in the email. Both health units were scheduled to close Oct. 31.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. (Image credit: NASA Goddard/Bill Hrybyk)

On Aug. 4, in another internal email obtained by Space.com, managers were notified of more closures — a list that includes buildings, services and employee socialization hubs across Goddard and Wallops. Effective Oct. 1, both centers were set to close their employee cafeteria and motor pool services, as well as vending services and the recreation center at the Greenbelt campus.

Like the face-to-face collaboration benefits lost at GISS, employees fear shutting down Goddard’s cafeteria will be stifling. “Being able to meet with colleagues and build relationships over lunch has a big impact,” Wendy said. “That will be a hit to our ability to do our jobs.”

NASA officials say maintaining the cafeteria has been a strain on the center’s budget. To compensate, Goddard administration arranged for food trucks on campus as an alternative option for employees.

Most alarming on the email’s list were both facilities’ visitor centers. Closing the visitor centers at Goddard and Wallops would cut off the only public-facing arms of NASA in their areas and eliminate the communities’ primary way of interacting with the space agency.

Union fights back

Amid the turmoil over facilities closures, the union representing Goddard workers took action. A GESTApress release on Aug. 15 opposed the decisions, and speculated tha