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For half a year now, NASA’s been weathering a storm on every front, from its budget to its chain of command and potential program terminations. Employee uproar was an inevitable chapter of the saga.
A group of 360 current and former NASA employees have penned a letter rebuking “rapid and wasteful changes” across staffing, mission and budgetary cuts at the space agency.
“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 says, noting concerns that the proposed downsizing in personnel and funding are “arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law” and that “the consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire.”
Signatories of the letter, titled the Voyager Declaration, urge the U.S. leadership not to implement “harmful” cuts and dispute “non-strategic staffing reductions,” curtailing research projects, as well as cancelling contracts and participation in international missions or assignments for which Congress has already appropriated funding. It’s no small list of objections raised at a time of broader uncertainty at NASA, which faces significant — and long chronicled — declines in funding and staff, amid a broader White House push to shrink down the federal workforce.
