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By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a public rebuke of and open act of dissent from President Donald Trump’s budget cutting priorities and policies, hundreds of NASA employees signed a letter made public Monday compelling leaders of the space agency not to carry out the deep budget cuts advocated by this president.
In the letter addressed to Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation Trump appointed this month to run NASA, the employees write to “bring to your attention recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”
“We, the signatories of this letter, dissent from these policies, and raise these concerns because we believe strongly in the importance of NASA’s mission, which we are dedicated to uphold, the The Voyager Declaration says.
“Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully. Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire.”
They warned of the consequences of major budget cuts that would halt many science missions.
Bethany Stevens, the NASA press secretary, responded in an email statement claiming NASA would never compromise on safety.
“Any reductions — including our current voluntary reduction — will be designed to protect safety-critical roles,” she said. “To ensure NASA delivers for the American people, we are continually evaluating mission lifecycles, not on sustaining outdated or lower-priority missions.”
Upheaval within the space agency continued on Monday, when Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced she was “stepping aside” on Aug. 1. In an email sent to center employees at 12:45 p.m., she did not give a reason for her departure. Cynthia Simmons, the center’s deputy director, will take over as acting director.
“I am honored to have been part of this incredible journey with you,” Dr. Lystrup wrote.
The NASA letter follows similar letters of criticism by federal employees at the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, said he welcomed respectful dissent, but the E.P.A. placed 144 employees who signed that agency’s letter on leave.
“We’re scared of retaliation,” said Monica Gorman, an operations research analyst at Goddard. She said that staff “go to the bathroom to talk to each other, and look under the stalls to make sure that no one else is there before we talk.”
Gorman is one of 287 current and former NASA employees who signed the letter, although more than half did so anonymously. More than 15,000 people work at the space agency. Prominent scientists outside of NASA, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, also offered their names in support.
The N.I.H. letter inspired some people at NASA to put together a similar effort. The N.I.H. letter writers had called their dissent the “Bethesda Declaration” — the agency is in Bethesda, Md. — and the NASA letter writers called theirs the “Voyager Declaration,” in honor of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the two NASA space probes launched in the 1970s that continue to function as they fly through interstellar space.
“One of the messages that NASA management has been passing down to every employee is that no one is coming to save us, including Congress,” said one of the organizers of the letter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for retaliation. “So the Voyager Declaration is one effort to raise our voices and speak out to save ourselves.”
The letter is framed as a “formal dissent” — an official process at NASA for registering disagreements that managers may not want to hear. It was part of changes instituted at NASA after the losses of the Columbia and Challenger space shuttles when concerns of some engineers were brushed aside.
As defined in NASA Procedural Requirement 7120.5F, Formal Dissent is “a substantive disagreement with a decision or action that an individual judges is not in the best interest of NASA and is of sufficient importance that it warrants a timely review and decision by higher-level management.”
The letter urges Duffy not to implement the cuts proposed by this administration, “as they are not in the best interest of NASA. We wish to preserve NASA’s vital mission as authorized and appropriated by Congress. We look forward to working alongside you and all of NASA leadership to continue that mission: ‘to explore the unknown in air and space, innovate for the benefit of humanity, and inspire the world through discovery’.”
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