NASA Chief of Staff Action Items
Keith’s note: according to this Reuters article: “NASA Chief of Staff Brian Hughes speaking at the same town hall, agreed, saying it would “probably be considered irresponsible” to wait for the congressional budget process. The letter added that Hughes recently ordered NASA science programs targeted for cancellation in Trump’s budget request to stop issuing press releases celebrating new scientific results and achievements.” In addition, senior staff at recent meetings at NASA with Hughes have been told not to expect any help from Congress in pushing back against the plan embodied in the President’s FY 2026 Budget Request i.e. multiple mission cancellations and large personnel layoffs. This is in direct contrast to an offer made last week to senior NASA staff by Acting Interim Administrator Duffy to listen to – and then consider – pushing for budget increases (restoration) for items planned for deletion – if a solid case can be made. And today the “Voyager Declaration”, signed by many NASA employees complaint about a variety of unpopular actions, certainly made national news. Word has it that Hughes and his staff were not at all pleased by this or the news coverage – especially CNN’s article. Meanwhile, consolidation of and deletion of various NASA social media accounts continues. Of course this has a side benefit of allowing those missions now scheduled to go away to not have any mention made of whatever scientific results they are still quite capable of providing. This of course hastens the ability for them to just fade away.
8 responses to “NASA Chief of Staff Action Items”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Feels more and more like naming Duffy was just a cover to oust Petro and put Brian Hughes in charge.
Did I read this right? Sean Duffy is pushing towards more funding and retaining much of NASA’s talent? So why then are people complaining?
Um, because every single Trump official lies through his/her teeth.
Huh? The Senate just past their version of the 2026 budget which keeps almost everything in place regarding NASA. So what, exactly, is Hughes talking about? Oh, that’s right, I forgot. You can’t believe anything any Trump official says.
I’m just waiting for SCOTUS to rule on impoundment already, so we know if the Legislative and Judicial branches still have any power or are just a ceremonial vestige
How quickly we forgot the thousands of engineering and technical support contractors that were cut loose just within the past couple years or so, with many of those FTEs being replaced with (probationary) civil servant new hires. Nelson, Melroy, and Free left things in such fine shape before they all retired that it barely took a tap for the setup to tumble. Easy to do after getting away with ignoring unflattering OIG and OBM reports for decades. So you can blame Brian Hughes for accomplishing so much horrific destruction in 6 weeks if you must. And since your imagination is already running wild, just imagine what could/should happen with the other 99.7% of gov’t spending. -30-
Brian Hughes, is that you?
No one has added a significant amount of civil servants to the NASA workforce since the 1980s: https://www.planetary.org/charts/fy-2026-nasa-workforce-cuts
This can’t be real…. are the new hires in the room with us? Not sure what Fox News/MAGA pipeline you’ve been feeding from but this is straight hogwash.