Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA
So far, NASA has been spared the sweeping cuts that DOGE has unleashed on other federal agencies. Is that about to change?
On January 20th, in his Inaugural Address, Donald Trump spoke rapturously about space exploration. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” he said. Later that day, Elon Musk, owner of the aerospace firm SpaceX and a longtime proponent of Mars settlement, addressed a post-Inauguration celebration. The President had made him the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was about to start slashing the federal bureaucracy. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk told Trump supporters. “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars.”
NASA headquarters, in Washington, D.C., observed Inauguration Day as a holiday, but many of its employees worked anyway. The agency had astronauts in orbit, rockets to launch, and astronomical data to decipher. Major changes were coming, however. Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA under the Biden Administration, stepped down from his post. NASA had briefly indicated that Jim Free, its highest-ranking civil servant, would take over as interim director while Trump’s nominee, the billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, awaited Senate confirmation. But, at 9:41 P.M., an e-mail was sent to NASA employees with the subject line “A Message from Acting Administrator Janet Petro.” Free had been passed over, though it wasn’t clear why. Petro, a graduate of West Point, had previously overseen the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. She introduced herself by saying, “We do hard things every day, and this will be no different.”
The hard things began on January 22nd. In a second e-mail, Petro announced that NASA would be complying with an executive order by shutting down all contracts and offices related to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (D.E.I.A.). “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” Petro wrote. Many federal agencies had sent out similar letters, but she signed her name to it. (Fox News later reported that such programs had cost thirteen million dollars between 2021 and 2024—which, if true, would be on the order of one ten-thousandth of NASA spending.) During the first Trump Administration, NASA’s strategic plan had prioritized the targeted recruitment of a diverse workforce; managers within the agency had been tasked with advancing equal-employment opportunities and implementing D.E.I. policies. But the second Trump Administration would punish people who had carried out these orders.
At NASA headquarters, a longtime employee read Petro’s message at her desk, dumbfounded. She went straight to a friend’s office. “What the fnck?” the employee mouthed.
The friend motioned at her to come in and close the door. They found one detail in Petro’s e-mail particularly chilling: NASA employees were to report co-workers who edited D.E.I.A. descriptors out of job titles or contracts. Failure to do so within ten days would result in “adverse consequences.” “Where are we working that this is what we are doing?” the employee said. They wondered aloud whether Petro deserved a measure of sympathy; she was the first woman to lead NASA, and wouldn’t the D.E.I.A. letter have gone out regardless of who was in the job? Then they began to discuss some samples from outer space. This was NASA, after all, and the work went on.
NASA headquarters, a bland stone office building that is currently owned by a Korean investment firm, is situated a few blocks southeast of the National Mall. Darren Bossie, the new White House liaison to NASA, arrived shortly after Trump’s Inauguration. Bossie was more or less unknown at the agency, but employees soon found his LinkedIn profile. He had spent four of the past seven years bouncing around conservative politics, with a stint as Trump’s White House liaison to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had worked as a senior consultant for unnamed companies. For the bulk of his professional life, however—from 2006 to 2018—he had been an assistant manager at a Total Wine & More in Palm Beach County, Florida. “That didn’t seem very promising,” a senior NASA official told me. (A total of seven current and outgoing NASA employees spoke with me on condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation.)
In hopes of understanding Bossie’s ascent to the national stage, I called every Total Wine & More location in Palm Beach County and spoke to half a dozen employees. One of them worked briefly with Bossie but could tell me only that he was knowledgeable about wine, good with people, and efficient. The others didn’t recognize his name.
A review of public records, however, suggested that Darren is the brother of David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United—the conservative group whose litigation before the Supreme Court empowered mega-donors and corporations to make unlimited contributions to political candidates. During Trump’s first Presidential run, David was the deputy manager of the campaign; in 2017 and 2018, he was known for fund-raising efforts in support of conservative candidates. During that period, his brother was hired into what appears to have been his first federal job—deputy director of the Office of Secretarial Boards and Councils at the Department of Energy. (In 2019, Trump distanced himself from David Bossie after he was accused of profiting off the President’s likeness; at the time, David said he was being “unfairly targeted by left-wing smear tactics.”) In response to questions, a White House official said that Darren Bossie has “extensive experience” and “is playing a key role in ensuring NASA realigns its priorities to deliver on [Trump’s] vision.”
Shortly after President Trump began his second term, he directed all federal employees to return to the office for in-person work. His Administration also gave agencies four days to share lists of various “probationary” employees—typically those with less than one or two years of service—with the Office of Personnel Management. The memo noted that probationary employees could be terminated without triggering an appeals process; it didn’t take a rocket scientist (seventh floor, perhaps?) to see what Trump wanted. “One plus one equals fire them,” a NASA manager said.
On January 28th, the O.P.M. sent an e-mail with the subject line “A Fork in the Road” to more than two million federal employees. It contained a pre-written “deferred resignation” letter. By replying with the word “resign,” workers could instantly accept administrative leave but, the e-mail claimed, maintain full salaries, benefits, and retirement accruals until September 30th. (An e-mail with the same subject line had gone out to Twitter employees after Musk took over the company.) It was a one-time offer. Employees had a little over a week to decide.
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When Trump’s second term began, about a third of the employees at NASA headquarters typically worked in the office. Because the agency encompasses more than a hundred and fifty active missions at twenty major centers and facilities, many staffers spend their days on video calls. Over the course of several weeks, however, workers began to show up. Bossie walked the hallways and dropped in on meetings. “If you leave your office, put a Post-it note on the door,” the manager and others were advised. “Put several. Look busy.”
Staffers told me that water-cooler conversations had changed for the worse. The longtime employee heard tell that people were actually e-mailing the address from the January 22nd message and ratting each other out. NASA employees had historically put everything important into writing, but some higher-ups were now trying not to document anything that might invite scrutiny, and some staffers were following suit. Group chats proliferated on Signal, the encrypted-messaging app. Some had hundreds of members.
Two of my sources said that, in early February, an unfamiliar man walked around the Science Mission Directorate, the NASA branch that oversees space telescopes, Mars rovers, and other robotic missions. He was seemingly taking pictures of pride flags in employee workspaces. One of them heard that it was Bossie. According to the manager, a supervisor passed along a verbal instruction: “Scrub the area so that nobody gets fired.” Asked for comment, a White House official said that Bossie was documenting empty offices. “While he did notice the flags—including Biden-Harris, Ukraine, and pride flags—he never recommended enforcing removal of them,” the official said.
On February 7th, NASA employees again received “A Message from Acting Administrator Janet Petro.” “I know the recent executive orders and subsequent guidance are weighing on many of you,” she wrote. She noted the fortitude and dedication of NASA employees, then got down to business. The deferred-resignation offer—what some NASA scientists were calling “the derp”—had been extended. Employees were no longer able to note their pronouns in e-mail addresses and signature lines. “Taking some inspiration from the spirit of the ‘Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),’ ” Petro wrote, “NASA should lean into this opportunity to maximize efficiencies” and “find new ways to work smarter.”
Next came an executive order that outlined a “Workforce Optimization Initiative” led by DOGE. It instructed federal agencies to prepare “large-scale reductions in force.” They were to prioritize the termination of anyone whose job was not legally mandated, including those who worked on D.E.I.A. and those who were not designated as “essential” during government shutdowns. DOGE would soon arrive at NASA headquarters.
By Tuesday, February 21st, about nine hundred of NASA’s eighteen thousand employees—five per cent of the agency’s workforce—had accepted deferred resignation. “NASA lost some folks that are true, worldwide-acknowledged experts in their field,” a leader at the agency told me. “You scare people into retiring, and it’s not just that NASA will be slower without them. We are going to lose entire abilities. We don’t understand the long-term implications in a field that’s this hard until it’s too late.”
In recent years, NASA and Elon Musk have become increasingly interdependent. Today, the agency is almost completely reliant on his rockets to launch astronauts to the International Space Station and probes to the outer solar system. SpaceX is one of NASA’s largest contractors—they are building the agency’s crewed moon landers, and would inevitably be central to an American Mars-colonization program. The company’s research and development efforts have often depended on outside investors, and Jared Isaacman, the presumptive future administrator of NASA, reportedly paid hundreds of millions of dollars for multiple trips to space on Musk’s rockets. In late January, Petro announced that Michael Altenhofen, who she said spent fifteen years at SpaceX, was now a senior adviser to the NASA administrator.
NASA has robust conflict-of-interest policies based in the U.S. legal code, but any influence that Musk exerts over his largest customer will call into question NASA’s independence. It’s unclear whether his enthusiasm for space exploration, and his influence with Trump, could help shield the agency from sweeping cuts—or encourage Musk to remake it in his image. Right now NASA doesn’t appear to have the money to pursue its existing lunar program and the Mars program that Musk envisions, and this suggests that a reckoning could be coming.
DOGE has gained notoriety for employing inexperienced and college-age engineers, but its first emissary to NASA was a fortysomething founder of an investment-management fund, Scott M. Coulter. Coulter arrived on Wednesday, February 12th; he appeared to interact only with high-level NASA personnel who work on the ninth floor, and seemed most concerned with federal contracts. By the following week, he had moved on to the Social Security Administration.
The Office of Personnel Management gave federal agencies a deadline of Monday, February 17th—President’s Day—to fire any probationary employees who were not considered mission-critical. (Such employees are often nicknamed “probies.”) But managers were also instructed to rank such workers and, later, to include a justification for anyone who should be kept. “They didn’t know we had to rank them, because that’s horrible,” the manager told me. Many probationary employees in the Science Mission Directorate, expecting not to come back the following week, spent Valentine’s Day and the weekend organizing their work and sending it to others, unprompted. “That made me feel like a bigger sack of shit,” the manager said.
NASA leadership was contemplating cutting as many as thirteen hundred probationary employees, according to reports. At a graying agency where employees cultivate hyper-specific skill sets, every loss, from senior executive to intern, is felt. “Space flight is an art,” the NASA leader told me. Written procedures only go so far. “The fact that Pin 38 on some connector has to be installed at an angle because you’ll scratch Pin 40—that’s never in a procedure. That’s the kind of knowledge you don’t even know you have until you need it, and you can only learn it by watching others.”
Across a series of tense meetings in the first half of February, a small number of senior NASA leaders tried to persuade Acting Administrator Petro to push back forcefully against the order to fire probationary employees. Two of my sources told me that, at one point, Nicola (Nicky) Fox, the leader of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and others argued that missions were going to fail—not years in the future but potentially weeks in the future. (The White House official said that my sources’ account was “not accurate.”) Some workers whose jobs were at risk were at Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California, and Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where spacecraft were being prepped to be launched within weeks. Would they be able to devote all of their focus to life-and-death duties, or would they be worrying about looming mortgage and tuition payments?
According to my sources, Petro listened to the arguments. O.K., she said: We’re going to say we don’t have any expendable workers. It was a bold decision: the Trump Administration would have no qualms about firing an interim appointee such as Petro. (On Tuesday, February 18th, the National Science Foundation had held an emergency Zoom meeting during which it fired a hundred and seventy people—ten per cent of its workforce.) NASA’s scientists and engineers waited for their own Zoom invite, but it never came. The Office of Personnel Management must have accepted her recommendation.
The O.P.M. declined to comment and referred The New Yorker to NASA; NASA, in turn, did not answer written questions or return phone calls. Instead, the White House official responded. “NASA’s probationary employees were not dismissed because as the administration has said, those with mission critical roles will remain in their jobs,” the official wrote. “DOGE’s mission is to make the government more efficient, not eliminate hardworking, innovative employees.”
In mid-February, a new DOGE official turned up at NASA headquarters. Riley Sennott, a twentysomething tech worker with reported ties to Musk’s electric-vehicle company, Tesla, was processed into the agency as a senior adviser in the ninth-floor administrator’s suite. Rumors spread quickly. “What does he look like?” the NASA manager asked a colleague. He was said to have acne and wear business casual—blazer, button-down, no tie—but no one could say what he looked like. A third DOGE representative later arrived: Alexander Simonpour, reportedly an engineering manager from Tesla.
On February 22nd, the Office of Personnel Management instructed federal workers to “reply to this e-mail with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” My sources described the e-mail as maddeningly amateurish, which is to say that they took it as a legitimate O.P.M. communiqué. But “A Message from Acting Administrator Janet Petro” soon followed. “You are not required to respond, and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,” Petro wrote. Apparently, the acting administrator had changed her approach. My sources were divided on whether Petro was a hero or a villain; one praised her for protecting the probationary employees, but I was also sent screenshots of texts and e-mails that denounced her for advancing the agenda of the Trump Administration.
A week later, the courts caught up with the Office of Personnel Management. In one of several legal setbacks for the Trump Administration, a federal judge ruled that a mass firing of probationary workers would be unlawful. According to reports, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said, “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency.” (About half of the fired National Science Foundation workers were eventually reinstated.) The manager felt that two phases of DOGE’s cost-cutting were over. If the first phase was about intimidating workers into leaving—ending diversity efforts, forcing a return to office, and threatening terminations while dangling the derp—then the second was about eliminating the easiest-to-fire employees. At NASA, this phase had largely failed.
But my sources anticipated that a more drastic third phase—“reductions in force” that are shrinking numerous federal agencies—would cut significant numbers from NASA’s workforce, not by targeting individual employees but, rather, by eliminating their positions altogether. NASA encompasses eighteen thousand people who work in such places as Huntsville, Alabama; southern Mississippi; and Houston. The Trump Administration could trim twigs from its org chart, or take an axe and lop off entire limbs, erasing whole offices. An early data point came in the beginning of March. After a meeting that involved Sennott, from DOGE, NASA leaders decided to eliminate the Office of the Chief Scientist, a team of six that gave unbiased scientific advice to the administrator. “Now that ability is gone,” the senior official told me. The outgoing chief scientist was also the agency’s climate adviser. The Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy was dissolved, too. In total, NASA fired twenty-three people at headquarters, including several who worked for a D.E.I.A. office. Employees were not offered the chance of reassignment elsewhere in the agency; they were given thirty days of notice even though sixty is customary.
More layoffs were sure to come. Agency leaders have been meeting with DOGE officials and are collecting information from various departments as they develop a reductions-in-force plan. (NASA was given an extension for submitting its plan to the Trump Administration.) My sources warned of the potential consequences. “As soon as we lose our values, we’re going to kill somebody,” the NASA leader said. “We’re going to blow up a spacecraft.” They added that China’s space program—including its scientific research efforts—is growing rapidly. “If you want to give up your leadership in space, you do what the Administration is doing right now,” the leader went on. “A cut to research doesn’t just affect this year’s budget,” he said. “That’s funding for the person studying dark matter in a black hole at some university. And their Nobel Prize in thirty years is out the window.”
On March 7th, a nonprofit awarded NASA the title “Best Place to Work in the Federal Government” for the thirteenth consecutive year. But nobody seems to care about that anymore, the manager told me. NASA is not the same organization that it was two months ago. Its civil servants have a track record of working fifty-to-sixty-hour weeks, based on spacecraft trajectories rather than terrestrial clocks. Perhaps no longer. “Why should anyone give up hours of personal time every week for an Administration that says you’re dirt?” the manager said. Resignations, layoffs, and disruptions are likely to affect NASA’s work far into the future. “A mistake made today might not come to fruition, so to speak, until an astronaut is on the surface of the moon in a few years,” the manager told me. “Do you want to be the Administration that killed astronauts?”
