Columbia University’s Armstrong Hall had hosted NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies: NASA/GISS/Robert Schmunk
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump administration, led by Elon’s Musk’s DOGE team of hackers and aided by complicit Republicans in Congress, is engaged in a war on science like nothing anyone has ever seen in American history. The administration is threatening to cut the federal budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in half, canceling leases on buildings and other cuts where critical climate science research is conducted.
In the latest move, the administration announced it is canceling a long time lease on Armstrong Hall at Columbia University in New York where the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been located for decades.
Employees were informed of this decision in an email from the director of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland.
The lab is located above the diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was featured in the TV Show “Seinfeld.” Scientists conduct climate and space studies there and collaborate with researchers at Columbia, now under attack by this president who is threatening to withhold billions in federal research funding on global warming and the changing climate even though a federal judge on Thursday significantly curtailed the administration’s ability to block funds from schools for engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Two other courts are considering similar challenges, and the unions for NASA employees are having meetings to discuss their next moves. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the American Federation of Government Employees say their science workers are facing unfair and unlawful attacks by Congress and this administration.
The Goddard lab tracks global climate conditions and serves as one of the main centers worldwide for this information, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is also facing deep budget cuts and forced employee layoffs. They run the computer models that project Earth’s future climate conditions and seek to better understand global climate change, something Donald Trump has repeatedly called a “hoax.”
The supercomputers for those models are located in Maryland, managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, the largest combined organization of scientists and engineers in the U.S. dedicated to increasing knowledge of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe via observations from space.
Sources who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution say it will be difficult for the lab to carry out its missions remotely, and the move is “demoralizing” for the workforce. In addition, the same scientists are “waiting for the axe to fall on the mission of Earth science” at the agency.
An administration budget proposal, if enacted by Congress, would cut the agency’s science programs by nearly 50 percent.
“GISS has a significant place in the history of space science, for decades leading groundbreaking work in understanding planetary atmospheres and systems – especially that of our own Earth,” Goddard director Mackenzie Lystrup wrote in the email. “And while the lease is ending, the Institute’s mission continues.”
But scientists and their unions are not so sure.
Lystrup indicated the decision to terminate the lease was linked to ongoing reviews by the current administration of all government leases, but did not give further details on the decision, including whether it was made by NASA or outside the agency by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Goddard has been in New York since its founding in 1961, established there “on the premise that conducting theoretical research in the space sciences would be facilitated by being near the leading universities in the greater metropolitan area.” It has been in its current offices, in a building known as Armstrong Hall, since the late 1960s.
The institute has been led since 2014 by Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who served as the agency’s acting senior climate adviser in 2021. More than 130 people work at the center in New York.
NASA leases more than 43,000 square feet in the building, paying an annual rent of $3.03 million, according to data from the General Services Administration and confirmed by a NASA spokesperson. That lease was set to run through August 2031.
While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself, Lystrup said in the email.
“We will provide the support necessary for employees to transition to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team,” she said in the email. “And while the lease is ending, the Institute’s mission continues. The work of the GISS team is considered critical for the Earth Science Division, particularly as the Division looks to the future of its modeling work and capabilities.”
Schmidt insisted that the work will continue one way or another, the data will be preserved.
“The science will continue because science is done by people not by buildings,” he said.
Agency sources said they are concerned that the center could become a victim of budget cuts. A draft “passback” budget proposal for NASA delivered to the agency earlier this month by the Office of Management and Budget proposed cutting NASA’s Earth science budget by more than 50 percent to about $1 billion in fiscal year 2026.
In all the announced, proposed budget cuts, no word has come on whether any of the federal contracts might be canceled with SpaceX and Elon Musk, reportedly in the range of $18 billion. Some consider it an ethical or legal conflict of interest for Musk to be involved in making decisions about the budget for an agency that has granted him billions in federal contacts for years.
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