Latest news with #CaseyDreier
India.com
12-07-2025
- Politics
- India.com
NASA facing a major exodus? Space agency to lose most experienced employees due to..., 2145 senior staff members, 875 top-level workers planning to...
NASA is about to lose a large number of its most experienced employees. According to an internal report shared by Politico , 2,145 senior staff members in important roles including 875 top-level GS-15 workers are planning to leave. In total, 2,694 NASA employees have chosen to take early retirement, accept buyout offers, or delay their resignations. These people hold important technical and leadership positions, and their exit could have a big impact on NASA's work. This is all part of a larger effort to reduce the size of the workforce. But with so many skilled people leaving at once, it's raising concerns about how NASA will manage its future projects. Is NASA facing a major exodus? NASA is seeing a huge wave of resignations, with 1,818 employees from its main missions in science and human spaceflight planning to leave. Many others from important support roles like IT and finance are also going. Experts are worried this means NASA is losing a big part of its technical and leadership strength. Casey Dreier, a space policy expert from The Planetary Society, warned that the agency is losing the people who keep its core work running, and raised serious questions about whether this is the right move. These exits are happening at the same time as a proposed 25 per cent budget cut in 2026 from the White House. That plan could reduce NASA's total workforce by over 5,000 employees, bringing it down to its smallest size since the early 1960s. All 10 of NASA's regional centers will be hit, including: Goddard Space Flight Center – losing 607 staff Johnson Space Center – 366 staff Kennedy Space Center – 311 staff NASA Headquarters – 307 staff Langley Research Center – 281 staff Marshall Space Flight Center – 279 staff Glenn Research Center – 191 staff A big loss of experience at NASA The recent wave of staff exits at NASA is causing serious concern, especially because many of those leaving are key to future space missions, including plans to return to the Moon by 2027 and future Mars exploration. Some job cuts, like those at the Goddard Space Flight Center, match the White House's cost-cutting goals. But others are taking away vital knowledge and skills that NASA depends on. One outgoing employee, who asked to stay anonymous, said the agency is facing 'a lot of experience drain' and that this could disrupt operations. Casey Dreier from The Planetary Society said: 'You're losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency. What's the strategy, and what do we hope to achieve here?' One former NASA staff member said they chose to resign partly because they were worried about the future. They mentioned fear over major budget cuts and the fact that NASA still doesn't have a Senate-confirmed administrator, saying, 'Things just sound like it's going to get worse.' So far, only half of the planned 5,000 job cuts have been reached through early retirements and voluntary exits. If enough people don't leave through this program which ends July 25 the agency may be forced to make involuntary job cuts.
Time of India
10-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Over 2,000 senior-level NASA employees resign, one 'warns': Things just sound like it's going to get ..
NASA is facing a significant loss of expertise, with 2,145 senior-level employees in GS-13 to GS-15 positions, including 875 GS-15 staff, set to depart, according to internal documents cited by Politico. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now These employees, who represent critical managerial and technical expertise, make up the majority of the 2,694 civil staff accepting early retirement, buyouts, or deferred resignations as part of broader federal workforce reduction efforts. Is it Exodus at NASA The exodus spans NASA's core mission areas, with 1,818 staff from science and human space flight roles leaving, alongside others in support functions like IT and finance. 'You're losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,' warned Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, questioning the strategy behind the departures align with a proposed 2026 White House budget that would cut NASA's funding by 25% and reduce staff by over 5,000, shrinking the agency to its smallest size since the early 1960s. All 10 NASA regional centers are affected, with Goddard Space Flight Center losing 607 staff, Johnson Space Center 366, Kennedy Space Center 311, NASA headquarters 307, Langley Research Center 281, Marshall Space Flight Center 279, and Glenn Research Center 191. Lot of experience drain While some cuts, like those at Goddard, align with White House goals, the loss of staff critical to lunar missions by mid-2027 and future Mars plans raises concerns. A departing NASA staffer, speaking anonymously, described the cuts as causing 'a lot of experience drain,' potentially disrupting operations. 'You're losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,' said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now 'What's the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?' A an employee who has resigned described their decision to leave as influenced in part by fear of the proposed NASA budget cuts and the lack of a Senate-approved NASA administrator: 'Things just sound like it's going to get worse.' The staffer cited fears of deeper budget cuts and the absence of a Senate-approved NASA administrator as factors in their decision to only half of the White House's targeted 5,000 staff reductions met, further involuntary cuts loom if participation in the deferred resignation program, ending July 25, falls short. However, Congress could reject these proposals, as the Senate Commerce Committee has signaled support for retaining NASA staff in a March bill.
Times
28-06-2025
- Science
- Times
‘Nasa is being savaged' — budget cuts and politics put space exploration in jeopardy
I t put a man on the moon, sent a rover to Mars and unlocked some of the greatest secrets of the universe. But for all Nasa's past achievements, team spirit is in the doldrums. 'It's not a happy time to work at Nasa right now,' said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society. 'There's very low morale and a huge amount of uncertainty.' The agency has been thrust into chaos by President Trump's proposed budget cuts, his rift with his former ally Elon Musk, and a U-turn on the nomination of Jared Isaacman as Nasa administrator. It should have been a time for optimism. Nasa is preparing to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972 — and this time it was to be no fleeting trip. It was to include moonbases and research stations in which astronauts would live and work, and a permanent space station orbiting the moon called the Lunar Gateway.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hiltzik: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes. Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on proposed NASA budget cuts The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, "NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration," says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on "practical, quantitative," even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. Read more: Hiltzik: Trump's assault on science will make Americans dumber and sicker The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: "America will always be the first in space," he said during his first term. "We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led." Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that "the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that." Among the "foreign class of servants," whom Vance acknowledged included "some German and Jewish scientists" who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. Read more: Hiltzik: Elon Musk's dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. "Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles," Dreier observes. In this White House, however, "there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency." A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a "hoax." He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Read more: How the U.S. gave up on Nobel Prize research Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. Read more: Hiltzik: The Pentagon's former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its "misguided ... Global Climate Change programs," and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is "very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do" in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. "Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money," Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but "I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates," Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. "You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space," he told me. "It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes." Get the latest from Michael HiltzikCommentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Axios
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Axios
NASA's Arizona science spend
NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars per state on average annually through its scientific missions, and Arizona is among the country's biggest recipients, a recent analysis shows. Why it matters: The space agency's science efforts bear the brunt of the cuts in the Trump administration's proposed budget, down nearly 50% to $3.9 billion. The big picture: Science represents about 30% of NASA's overall budget and includes missions like space telescopes, robotic probes and satellites that gather data about Earth's changing climate. While not always as headline-grabbing as human spaceflight, NASA's science activity has greatly enhanced our understanding of Earth and our celestial neighborhood. By the numbers: From 2022-2024, Arizona averaged the 10th most direct investment from NASA science spending in the country at $120 million per year, and had the ninth most overall spending last year with nearly $107 million, per data from The Planetary Society, a pro-space nonprofit. Nearly half the money in that three-year period ($58 million) went to Arizona's 7th Congressional District, home to the University of Arizona's main campus. Threat level: The Trump administration's proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would cut nearly $57 million in spending from the state. That would "severely curtail research" at University of Arizona and Arizona State University, The Planetary Society warns, putting 566 jobs at risk and jeopardizing $158 million in economic activity. Zoom out: California (About $3 billion), Maryland ($2 billion), Texas ($614 million), Virginia ($612 million) and Alabama ($586 million) saw the most NASA science spending on average annually across fiscal 2022-2024. Each is home to major NASA facilities. Those numbers represent obligations involving "research grants, contracts and cooperative agreements," the group says. Zoom in: Missions on the chopping block in Trump's NASA budget include the New Horizons spacecraft (first launched to study Pluto and now in the outer solar system) and Mars Sample Return, an ambitious joint American-European plan to collect Martian soil samples gathered by the Perseverance rover and bring them to Earth for further study. Nearly 20 active science missions would be canceled in total, the Planetary Society says, representing more than $12 billion in taxpayer investments. What they're saying: A chief concern, Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier tells Axios, is that already paid-for probes and telescopes would be deactivated even though they're still delivering valuable data, wasting taxpayer dollars already spent to launch and run them. "This is the part where you get pennies on the dollar return," Dreier says. "They keep returning great science for the very fractional cost to keep the lights on. And a lot of these will just be turned off and left to tumble in space."
