4000 Gone: Inside Nasa's Brain Drain

What kills me is that it's not even saving that much money.

The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.

(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)

Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.

The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.

Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.

It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.

  Social Security                    23%        16.30%
  Medicare                           14%        18.30%
  Health                             14%        11.60%
  Net Interest                       14%        12.30%
  National Defense                   13%        15.90%
  Income Security                    10%        6.70%
  Veterans Benefits and Services      5%        4%
  Transportation                      2%        1.70%
  Natural Resources and Environment   1%        1.20%
  Administration of Justice           1%        1%
  General Government                            4.2%
  Education, Employment, Training               1.9%
    and Social Services
  Other                               2%        4.90%
    SUM                              99%        100.00%

gone yes, but where?, space x, china?

A sort of naïve dream... NASA is not the budge, but the brains and lives put on it. It is not American. If you all can have the budget to survive with a check payment work, invest you dream and life on open sourcing the knowledge. Dont let it be an Alexandria Library, certainly ESA, Roscosmos and other future players can inherit your life efforts now or in coming centuries.

Heavy disagree with the point of this article. Their concern is that departures result in institutional memory loss. I think that rapid iteration >> institutional knowledge. Unfortunately NASA is at a point where private companies have to develop hardware independent of NASA and then sell it to NASA because their requirements are too dumb. I wanted to work at NASA/JPL for years but all the people I’ve met there have become paper subject matter experts by making 10 satellites and rovers while people at Nvidia, Apple and SpaceX ship millions of products and get to see hardware fail at scale. From what I have heard, NASA and legacy milaero contractors are where you go to get your new ideas crushed by incumbents. I think science is ripe for disruption where we privatize the process of doing science and publish the process and results publicly. NASA keeps much of their institutional knowledge to themselves from what I have experienced, I work in aerospace, and none of their data is readily available to me. Also, years ago JPL was criticized for significant delays in programs due to their policies. https://spacenews.com/psyche-review-finds-institutional-prob...

FTA, Michael Garcia, ex Hubble Project Scientist:

>> What surprised me was that initial budget request, which basically said, we, America, are never going to launch another space telescope. We're going to turn off 95% of the ones we have in orbit. We are getting out of that business, we don't want to ask those questions anymore.

So this hits on a few key points. It’s not just that this budget request is tossing out perfectly good technology maturation plans for getting the next large space telescope built (https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/habitable-wor...), among other goals.

It’s also (see the second sentence) that the budget request will result in de-orbiting perfectly-functioning operational missions like OCO-2 (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/), and deactivating perfectly functional instruments onboard ISS that are returning data continuously right now. It’s a multi-billion dollar self-own. There’s no sense in it. (https://www.planetary.org/charts/fy-2026-active-mission-canc...).

For many of these missions, having a long-term continuous dataset is super-valuable —- obviously so for a CO2 monitoring mission, or missions monitoring land surface temperature, vegetation/forests, etc. They are built, launched, and returning data. It’s all gravy at this point.

As nearby commenters note, this has nothing to do with cost savings. It’s more like a mix of pure spite, owning some libs in Maryland and California, and an object lesson in who the boss is.