WASHINGTON — Nearly 4,000 NASA employees, accounting for about one fifth of the agency’s workforce, have chosen to leave the agency through various voluntary processes, a significant reduction that may still fall short of the agency’s goals.
In an emailed statement late July 25, NASA said about 3,000 employees elected to participate in a second round of the agency’s Deferred Resignation Program, which also included programs called Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Voluntary Separation Incentive Program. The deadline for employees to sign up was 11:59 p.m. Eastern July 25.
This came after a first round of the Deferred Resignation Program earlier this year where 870 civil servants participated. NASA said that, accounting for both programs as well as “normal attrition” of about 500 employees over the same span, NASA would have about 14,000 civil servants.
The figures, which NASA said are subject to change depending on the number of employees who either withdraw from the buyout programs or have their resignations not approved by the NASA, mean that about 21% of NASA’s civil servant workforce is leaving through the voluntary programs.
NASA has not released additional demographics about the employees departing, including breakouts by center or mission directorate. The sharp reduction has alarmed many, both inside and outside NASA, because of the loss of expertise. Anecdotal observations suggest many of the departing employees are relatively senior, experienced employees.
“Employment issues that change the workforce in dramatic ways, I think, are terribly difficult, particularly at an agency where the expertise and longevity, the capabilities of people are hugely important and, in many instances, difficult to replace,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) at a July 22 Space Foundation conference. Moran chairs both the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA as well as the aviation and space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee.
He referenced a letter called the “Voyager Declaration” released July 21 and signed now by more than 360 current and former NASA employees, including several former astronauts and former senior agency officials. “Thousands of NASA civil servant employees have already been terminated, resigned or retired early,” the document stated, “taking with them highly specialized, irreplaceable knowledge crucial to carrying out NASA’s mission.”
“Any time someone at an agency or a department or in a business is suggesting that there are safety issues that are compromised, we have to take that kind of information seriously,” Moran said.
“Safety remains a top priority for our agency as we balance the need to become a more streamlined and more efficient organization and work to ensure we remain fully capable of pursuing a Golden Era of exploration and innovation, including to the Moon and Mars,” NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in the statement about the workforce.
The concerns about workforce reductions came up during a July 10 briefing about the upcoming Crew-11 launch to the International Space Station. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the time that he did not have a list of people in the program who had elected to leave. He added that those who do decide to leave will do so after Crew-11, launching no earlier than July 31, “so that mission is not affected at all.”
“In some cases, what I think we’ll see is that people that have been here for a long time and were planning to retire anyway may retire a little earlier,” he said, adding that he was not planning to leave.
“We have some tools as we’re trying to manage the critical skills in the workforce. There are ways that we can incentivize people to stay,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, at the briefing. “We can ask people to delay their departures so they can transfer their knowledge to other people.”
He added, though, that he didn’t want to “under express” the significance of the departures. “We are losing people and that we have folks that have been part of our team for a long time that are going. This is going to require us to take a different look at how we do our business, to focus our operation.”
In his first weekly memo to NASA employees since becoming acting administrator July 9, Sean Duffy did not mention the departures. “I see this not as a ceremonial role, but as a mandate to restore our focus — to recenter our work on what truly matters,” he wrote in the July 25 memo that largely recounted agency activities. He signed off the memo with the phrase “Tank you,” an apparent typo.
Duffy did send a separate message later about the departures. “To those who have chosen to depart, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your service. Your work has helped shape NASA’s extraordinary legacy of discovery and innovation,” he wrote. Some noted that those who had taken the buyouts and were already on administrative leave would not be able to directly receive the message since they no longer have access to NASA email.
While the departures account for a significant fraction of NASA’s civil servant workforce, they fall short of agency projections. NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget request projected that the number of employees would drop to 11,853 in fiscal year 2026, which implies that more than 2,000 additional civil servants could be involuntarily separated in the coming months. The budget document did not provide details on how it would carry out those reductions beyond references to “workforce reshaping efforts.”