Keith’s note. 2025 was a bad year for NASA due to DOGE and lack of real leadership. Then Jared Issacman arrived to help NASA get its mojo back. Well, 2026 is not 2025.
The other day Frank Slazer (AIA alumnus) tweeted this: “Predictable:
Workforce reductions have now registered simultaneously across 25 of 36 major projects.. understaffing drives risk-reduction cancellation, which drives schedule slip, which drives cost growth, which may ripple into neighboring programs” which links to “NASA Lost 1 in 5 Workers Last Year: Watchdog Finds 25 of 36 Projects Struggling“.
I replied “Agree @FSlazer. Predictable – and avoidable. Challenge for @NASA is to fill skill gaps and hire the next generation of #NASA employees, cross-train to prepare for this whole Golden Age of Science thing.” and tagged Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin. Frank Slazer replied “To be fair, most of the staffing reduction initiatives happened before @rookisaacman came onboard @NASA and he has made important efforts to improve the agency’s technical strength.”
Jared Isaacman then replied – at length:
“I would not read too much into dated news designed to needlessly elevate people’s blood pressure.
For starters, those who took voluntary retirement do not represent 22% of NASA’s integrated workforce. NASA had roughly 14,000 civil servants and more than 42,000 full-time contractors. The voluntary retirements represented closer to 7%.
For what it is worth, NASA’s history of programs running over budget and behind schedule, from Artemis to MSR, NEO Surveyor, and more, predates the voluntary retirement programs. A much bigger factor in NASA’s historic challenges has been taking on far too many projects, some externally imposed but many self-inflicted, while skipping the necessary building blocks for success that served the agency so well in decades past. That lack of extreme focus has been addressed in the President’s National Space Policy.
All that aside, Artemis II was a great success, and we are moving on Artemis III, with every KPI, from Mobile Launcher recovery and repair to stacking, tracking materially faster than Artemis II (specifics will be released later this week). Nancy Grace Roman is ahead of schedule and set to launch at the end of August. We are back to normal ISS crew rotations with a full astronaut complement, flying X-planes routinely, and making major investments in a nuclear-powered NASA.
We have been rebuilding core competencies across every Center, converting thousands of contractor positions back to civil service, and using NASA Force reach to bring in specialized talent, all while saving billions for more missions of science and discovery.
We have a long way to go, but for now, things are tracking well.”
