What happened?
On Feb. 6, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Director Laurie Leshin announced layoffs of 530 people, roughly 8% of the lab’s full-time workforce, as well as 40 additional contract staff. The news comes on top of the 100 contractors let go last month.
Why?
In the most direct sense, people are losing their jobs because Congress is fighting over the budget of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) project.
In response to a chilling independent assessment of the project, which projected years of delay and a total cost of $11 billion, NASA paused work on MSR and initiated a major programmatic reassessment, which is still underway.
In response, the U.S. Senate proposed slashing MSR’s budget to $300 million in 2024, a cut of $522 million; the House of Representatives, on the other hand, strongly supported the project and proposed an increase to $949 million, the amount originally requested by the White House. Neither budget has passed either chamber of Congress, nor has any compromise been proposed, despite being four months into the 2024 fiscal year.
Without clarity from Congress, NASA decided to limit the rate of spending on MSR to match the lowest possible budget scenario — the Senate’s $300 million — until Congress passes a full-year budget. JPL, which has the largest share of MSR-related work among NASA centers, feels a disproportionate consequence of these cuts and now must absorb a significant and sudden loss of funding. Hence the layoffs, among other cost-saving measures.
Is this only impacting JPL, or is this happening at other NASA centers?
Workforce struggles are likely happening at other NASA centers, though the consequences are different for civil servants. We have heard reports of contractors being let go at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which was working on a major MSR component that was suspended once the project went into reformulation. There may be similar situations occurring at other NASA centers as the agency is facing a shrinking budget for the first time in a decade. If this is occurring, details have not been made public. Generally, however, laying off civil servants (a “Reduction in Force,” or RIF) is less common in NASA history and far more visible due to their political impacts.
JPL, however, is not a standard NASA center, and its employees are not civil servants. It is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), which, while owned and funded by the government, is managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). FFRDCs provide, in principle, a greater degree of flexibility, compensation, and dynamism for their employees in exchange for fewer job protections. JPL’s workforce is, therefore, easier to downsize than a NASA center’s. JPL is also particularly reliant on planetary science projects as a funding source, and MSR was, until recently, the largest planetary project in recent history.