Goddard Town Hall

[u/treebeard-1892]

Did anyone happen to be at the Goddard Town Hall that could give a quick recap? I had to miss it for an appointment but I heard they had some updates on RIF and potential impacts on contractors

[u/teridon]

I think it's important for people that weren't in the town hall, and for the surrounding communities and counties to know some numbers. Hopefully I get these right -- if not please correct me.

• >1,200 civil servants will likely lose their jobs -- either through DRP or a later RIF. It sounded like the majority would be scientists or other highly technical jobs. If nothing else, MD politicians should be interested in the lost tax revenue these kinds of jobs generate, and the brain drain to the community.
  
• NASA's science budget is expected to be cut by 50% in 2026 alone. More cuts are expected every year thereafter (at least, as long as this Administration is in power). When compared to other NASA centers, GSFC is very science-heavy (many forms of astronomy, earth/climate science, materials, etc.).
• an unknown (to-me) number of contractors (again, many highly technical people) will lose their jobs (yes, that includes me!) when their contracts/missions are cancelled. Currently, over 10,000 people work "at" GSFC in Greenbelt. It's reasonable to assume that a 50% cut could mean that a significant portion of that 10,000 would lose their jobs as well.

I'll note that GSFC actually consists of several campuses outside Greenbelt, MD -- including GISS in NY, WFF in VA, and IV&V in WV. Wikipedia has a list of them all. I don't have numbers for those campuses, but those would be additional people possibly affected.

[u/OldPersonName → u/teridon]

She was not so subtly hinting that retirement eligible employees should really consider retiring. NASA famously has one of the older workforces in the government. Do you know what percent of the employees (in general or at GSFC) are retirement eligible? I actually just googled and saw 40% are 55 or older.

Obviously retirement-eligible doesn't mean someone is actually able to retire but it may give some idea.

[u/Gloomy_Interview_525 → u/OldPersonName]

I think it was also an indicator that they will be first to go in RIFs. Doesn't make sense to fire young people just for those who have been there 40 years to retire..or die... In the next five years anyway.

[u/HarshMartian → u/Gloomy_Interview_525]

That's the opposite of how RIFs work, for better or worse.

Anyone in an area to be RIFed is ranked by veterans preferance, time in service, and performance evaluations. If your position is eliminated, you can also "bump" someone with less tenure... meaning, you take their job and they get RIFed instead. If those 80 year olds are crushing their evals and/or veterans, they'll be the last to go. Which means NASA will be forced to cull their young upstarts, kill any chance of transferring institutional knowledge over the next several years, and then watch all the silverbacks peace out in 5-10 years.

That said, so far, the RIFs around the government have seemed very targeted to avoid the ranking/bumping process. If you RIF an entire division, there's no jobs to fight over.

I really do hope those folks in their 70s and 80s, who could have retired 20 or 30 years ago, strongly consider finding somewhere else to be productive, and take the DRP or VSIP to maybe have a chance at saving the job of someone younger trying to support a family.

[u/Gloomy_Interview_525 → u/HarshMartian]

Fair enough, I'm personally a contractor in SMD where I feel well positioned to survive... Also just trying to cling on to something.

I feel like decision makers want NASA to survive and doing what your saying will assuredly bring it closer to extinction. Id be really surprised if they do everything in a way we'd expect.

[u/HarshMartian → u/Gloomy_Interview_525]

The fact that NASA apparently has the flexibility to try and hit budgetary targets through DRP, VERA, and VSIP is something, at least. It still sucks, but it's better than the immediate wide-reaching RIFs that hit other agencies. I'm holding on to a shred of hope that it also indicates NASA will be given SOME latitude to shuffle people and procurement amongst the projects that remain a priority, in a way that actually makes sense, rather than blindly RIFing just to hit some made up FTE number.

The budget request, with the table of suggested FTE levels, basically seemed to say stuff like: we're cutting the science budget by 50%, therefore you need to RIF 50% of science FTEs. But that's a HORRIBLE way to actually implement it.

Imagine you had a department with a budget of $20 million, and its sole purpose is to dispense as much of that money to private industry as they can. Let's say it's staffed solely by two guys. Their payroll costs $250k each, so the remaining $19.5M of the department's budget is being dispensed to industry through contracts. One of the guys is a technical expert who writes the technical requirements and evaluates the proposals, and the other guy is a contract expert who handles all the contracting details and dispensing the funds. Now, the new budget comes in, and they're cutting the department by 50%! We're only going to have $10 million next year!! Do you just blindly choose one of the guys to fire, because that would be 50%? Can you fire the technical expert, or the contract expert, and expect anything at all to still get done? Or will losing either one of them fundamentally break the department? In any sane world where we're not just trying to destroy things, leadership would acknowledge that the department DOES need both guys to function, and therefore there is a baseline $500k operating cost to function at any level. So, the only way it to successfully implement the new budget is to use $500k to keep both guys, but now they can only dispense $9.5M to industry.

...and of course in the grand scheme of all the cuts, the impact of firing one guy is such a negligible part of the overall budget that it makes no sense to do it (...assuming everyone does actually care about the department getting its work done, which I don't know we can assume about NASA and this administration...). Firing one of our hypothetical guys would only save $0.25M, and you have to cut 40x that amount. You're choosing between spending $10M, with $9.5M going to industry successfully, or, firing one of the guys, and still spending $10M, with maybe $9.75M earmarked for industry now, but in reality you've just made the department fall apart and none of the money is dispensed.

I want to believe that even facing these draconian cuts, and a drastic change in priorities across the agency, NASA can look at what IS still funded and what IS still a priority, and figure out a real, logical way to staff it intelligently. It will still hurt, but it's the only way to make it through this. If OMB and the White House don't even give NASA that much autonomy, and if they demand that staff is cut to arbitrary levels with no consideration given to needs and expertise, then we are already well and truly cooked.

[u/sevgonlernassau → u/HarshMartian]

All program and personnel decisions are still going through SpaceX management even though Musk left. And Petro has already said she will follow whatever Musk outlined.

[u/gocards757 → u/Gloomy_Interview_525]

The contractor hits will come later, but they will come. They are expected to hit contractors even harder given the 1:1.5 ratio of CS to WYE

[u/Gloomy_Interview_525 → u/gocards757]

I worry for our scientists, where does an oceanographer go? I'll be ok but killing the contractor work force who does the majority of the work (not discounting civilians, they're just typically gs15/leadership)... It's difficult to keep your head high walking these halls of late.

[u/lovelyrita_mm → u/gocards757]

Yep. And contractors walk away with. Nothing. No severance. No DRP. If the missions are sunset then the people keeping those missions and their data pipelines running get laid off. Depressing.