‘Catastrophic impacts': NASA workers sign declaration to protest changes they say threaten safety and progress

CNN

6 days ago

A group of 287 scientists and current and former NASA employees has issued a declaration lambasting budget cuts, grant cancellations and a 'culture of organizational silence' that they say could pose a risk to astronauts' safety.
The document — titled 'The Voyager Declaration' and dedicated to astronauts who lost their lives in tragic spaceflight incidents of the past — is addressed to acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, a staunch Trump loyalist who abruptly replaced Janet Petro, a longtime NASA employee, in the agency's top role on July 9. The letter has 156 anonymous signatories and 131 public signatures — including at least 55 current employees.
'Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully,' states the letter to Duffy, a former reality TV personality who also currently serves as Transportation secretary. 'Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce.'
The letter raises concerns about suggested changes to NASA's Technical Authority, a system of safety checks and balances at the agency.
Established in the wake of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts, the Technical Authority aims to ensure mission safety by allowing NASA employees at all levels of the agency to voice safety concerns to leaders outside their direct chain of command.
'If you have a significant disagreement with a technical decision that's being made, (the system) gives someone an alternate avenue that's not their project manager or program manager' to express that concern, a source at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told CNN.
Changes to that system 'should be made only in the interests of improving safety, not in anticipation of future budget cuts,' the declaration reads.
The source said that they considered looming changes 'a really scary prospect, especially for my colleagues who work directly on the human spaceflight side of things.'
The letter comes as the agency is grappling with the impending loss of thousands of employees and broader restructuring.
A spokesperson for NASA leadership did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The signed letter is the most recent in a string of declarations rebuking proposed cuts and changes at other federal agencies.
Some National Institutes of Health employees led the way in June, publishing a declaration opposing what they called the politicization of research.
Another letter, signed by federal workers at the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month, resulted in about 140 people being placed on administrative leave. At least some of those workers will remain on leave until at least August 1, 'pending the Agency's inquiry,' according to internal email correspondence obtained by CNN.
One signatory of the NASA letter who spoke to CNN said they felt that expressing dissent against the Trump administration may pose a risk to their livelihoods, but they believed the stakes were too high to remain silent.
Ella Kaplan, a contractor employed by Global Science and Technology Inc. and the website administrator for the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, said she decided to publicly attach her name to the Voyager Declaration because 'the overall culture at NASA has very much shifted — and it feels a lot less safe for me.'
'That's been felt kind of universally by most minority employees at NASA,' Kaplan said.
While Kaplan said her job has not yet been directly threatened, in her view, 'I'm a member of the LGBT community … and I'm probably going to be fired for this at some point, so I might as well do as much community organizing as possible before that point.'
The letter and its signatories implore Duffy to evaluate recent policies they say 'have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.'
The declaration's criticism of changes to NASA's Technical Authority stem from statements made at an agency town hall in June. During that meeting, NASA executives said they planned to attempt to make the Technical Authority more 'efficient.'
'We're looking at: 'How do we do programs and projects more efficiently? And how much should we be spending on oversight?'' said Vanessa Wyche, NASA's acting associate administrator.
Garrett Reisman — a former NASA astronaut and engineer who later served as a SpaceX advisor — told CNN that he believes implementing some changes to the Technical Authority may be welcome. He noted that NASA may have become too risk averse in the wake of the Columbia tragedy, and the current structure may be hampering innovation.
But, Reisman said, any changes to the space agency's safety backstops need to be made with extreme care. And currently, he said, he does not trust that will happen.
'I have very little confidence that it will be done the right way,' Reisman, who signed the declaration, said. 'So far, this administration has used a very heavy hand with their attempts to remove bureaucracy — and what they've ended up doing is not making things more efficient, but just eliminating things.'
The signatories who spoke to CNN each expressed opposition to President Donald Trump's directives to shutter Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility — or DEIA — initiatives.
At NASA, leadership complied with Trump's executive order by shuttering a DEIA-focused branch, scrubbing pronouns from email signatures, and removing references to a pledge made during the president's previous term to land a woman and person of color on the moon for the first time. The space agency also shuttered employee groups that lent support to minority workers.
The source who spoke with CNN anonymously said that DEIA policies not only ensure a welcoming work environment — they're also essential to practicing sound science.
'The concept of inclusivity being a pathway to better science is something that has become really entrenched in the overall academic and scientific community in the last decade or so,' the source said, adding that the changes 'set an immediate tone for the destruction that was going to come.'
Among the other policies that the letter decries is the Trump administration's call for NASA to shutter some projects that have Congressional backing — a move the signatories say is wasteful and 'represents a permanent loss of capability to the United States both in space and on Earth.'
The NASA employee told CNN that leadership has already begun shutting down some facilities that the Trump administration put on the chopping block in its budget proposal, despite the fact that Congress appears poised to continue funding some of them.
'We've also been hearing repeatedly passed down from every level of management: No one is coming to save you; Congress is not coming to save you,' the source said. 'But it seems like Congress is moving towards an appropriations that's going to continue to fund our projects at approximately the same level.'
The source noted that they have first-hand knowledge of leadership beginning to decommission a clean room — a facility free of dust and debris where sensitive hardware and science instruments must be prepared for spaceflight — despite the fact that there are ongoing tests happening at the facility.
The Voyager Declaration also criticizes what it refers to as 'indiscriminate cuts' planned for the agency.
The White House's proposal to slash NASA's science budget by as much as half has been met with widespread condemnation from stakeholders who say such cuts threaten to cripple US leadership in the field.
Recent agency communication to staff has also noted that at least 3,000 staff members are taking deferred resignation offers, according to an internal memo, the authenticity of which was confirmed to CNN by two sources who had seen the communication.
Broader workforce cuts could also be on the horizon. NASA leadership under Petro also worked on an agency restructuring plan, though the details of that initiative have not yet been made public.
Other Trump-era changes denounced in the Voyager Declaration include directives to cancel contracts and grants that affect private-sector workers across the country and plans to pull the space agency out of some projects with international partners. The White House budget proposal calls for defunding dozens of projects, including the Lunar Gateway space station that the US would have worked on with space agencies in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
The letter and its signatories argue these policies are wasteful, squandering investments that have been years or decades in the making.
'American taxpayers have invested a lot of money in my education and training directly,' the Goddard source said. 'I'm in it for the public service — and I want to return that investment to them.'