NASA Lost 1 in 5 Workers Last Year: Watchdog Finds 25 of 36 Projects Struggling
A new federal watchdog report released Thursday finds that NASA shed nearly 4,000 civil servants — roughly 22 percent of its entire workforce — over the course of 2025, and that staffing-related impacts have now spread to 25 of the agency’s 36 active major projects. The Government Accountability Office’s annual assessment, its 18th consecutive report on NASA’s major project portfolio, documents specific skill shortfalls in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, information technology, and cybersecurity — a list identified by NASA’s own Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer. What those shortfalls have already produced at specific missions is no longer theoretical: the Venus atmosphere probe DAVINCI canceled risk-reduction activities in 2025 because it had lost too many program managers and engineers, and the Near Earth Object Surveyor asteroid-detection telescope at JPL lost both leadership and hands-on hardware development staff.
The Psyche asteroid mission is the cautionary precedent. When that program experienced a staffing shortfall in a prior year, it suffered a one-year launch delay and $132 million in additional costs — and the ripple effect reached the neighboring VERITAS Venus orbiter program at JPL, which shared resources. What distinguishes the current situation from the Psyche episode is scope: what happened to one mission then is now documented across a simultaneous majority of NASA’s portfolio. The GAO is explicit that the full weight of the reductions may not yet be visible: NASA’s workforce office acknowledged directly that “due to the gradual workforce reductions through January 2026, the impact of the reductions has not yet been fully realized across the agency,” according to SpaceNews.
Scale of the Departure: One in Five Engineers Gone
The workforce losses unfolded not through traditional layoffs but through federally administered deferred-resignation programs enacted as part of the Trump administration’s government-wide effort to reduce the federal workforce. Roughly 870 employees accepted the first round of the Deferred Resignation Program in February 2025; approximately 3,000 more accepted the second round, which closed in late July 2025, according to SpacePolicyOnline. Normal attrition added another roughly 500 departures over the same period, bringing the total to approximately 4,000 from a starting headcount of about 18,000.
No NASA center escaped, but the losses were deeply uneven. Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — home to DAVINCI, multiple Earth science programs, and some of the agency’s most complex engineering work — lost 34 percent of its civil servant workforce, making it the hardest-hit facility in the agency. The Langley Research Center in Virginia and Kennedy Space Center in Florida were among the next-hardest-hit. Other field centers recorded losses between 16 and 28 percent. NASA Headquarters in Washington absorbed an 11 percent reduction.
The specific disciplines lost matter as much as the raw numbers. The skill gaps NASA’s human capital office named to the GAO — aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, IT, and cybersecurity — are precisely the engineering bench required to move hardware from design through testing to launch. These are not administrative roles.
Which Programs Are Now at Risk
The GAO report names specific high-profile programs where workforce losses have moved from abstract risk to operational consequence.
The Orion crew capsule — which carried four astronauts around the Moon on the Artemis II mission in April 2026, the first crewed lunar journey since Apollo — shed 10 percent of its civil servant workforce and has struggled to backfill key positions. Orion also remains the single largest driver of cost growth in the entire portfolio: it accounts for more than half of all annual overruns and nearly 75 percent of cumulative overruns.
The Space Launch System Block 1B — the rocket that carried Artemis II — lost nearly 20 percent of its civil servants. Together with Orion, SLS accounts for $478.2 million of the $501.4 million in net annual cost overruns the GAO recorded across the 18 active development projects this year.
DAVINCI, the Discovery-class mission designed to send an atmospheric probe through the layered clouds of Venus — an instrument that would be the first American spacecraft to enter the Venusian atmosphere since the 1990s — lost so many engineers and program managers that it canceled various risk-reduction activities during 2025. The program received dedicated funding in the final FY2026 appropriations bill and has begun rebuilding its staff, but it now faces potential cancellation outright under the administration’s FY2027 budget proposal.
The Near Earth Object Surveyor — NASA’s congressionally mandated infrared space telescope designed to detect dark asteroids and comets that ground-based surveys miss — was hit at JPL by losses that stripped both program leadership and the engineers doing hands-on hardware assembly. NEO Surveyor passed its Critical Design Review in February 2025 and is targeting launch no earlier than September 2027. Congress tasked NASA in 2005 with detecting 90 percent of all near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (459 feet) across — a mandate the telescope is specifically designed to fulfill.
Why This Looks Different from One Mission Failing
A staffing-driven cost overrun or launch delay at any single NASA mission would be unremarkable by historical standards. The Psyche asteroid mission’s episode — shortfall in staffing leads to a one-year launch delay and $132 million in added cost — is a documented example of the mechanism, but it was one program’s problem.
What the GAO’s current report documents is different in kind. The same workforce reductions that hit Psyche as an isolated event have now registered simultaneously across 25 of 36 major projects. The Psyche mechanism — understaffing drives risk-reduction cancellation, which drives schedule slip, which drives cost growth, which may ripple into neighboring programs sharing the same institutional and physical resources — is now potentially active across the majority of the portfolio at once. The GAO’s own statement that the impact “has not yet been fully realized” implies the worst is structurally still ahead.
NASA’s portfolio-level numbers remain, by the agency’s historically troubled standards, relatively contained for now. Only two of the 18 active development projects reported schedule delays in the past year, totaling a combined two months; three reported cost overruns totaling $501.4 million annually. Cumulative overruns grew modestly, from $4.4 billion to $4.7 billion, and cumulative schedule delays grew from 13.1 years to 14 years. The relatively modest short-term numbers reflect the fact that workforce reductions were gradual — the accumulated institutional debt has not yet come due at most programs.
The GAO has also noted that two prior recommendations it elevated to “high priority” status — covering cost transparency and acquisition management — remained unimplemented as of May 2026. Those recommendations predate the workforce reductions and represent a separate, compounding vulnerability.
Artemis II Flew; What Comes Next May Not
The timing of this report matters. On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II from Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 PM ET — four astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, aboard an Orion spacecraft atop an SLS rocket, on a 10-day journey around the Moon. The crew splashed down in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego on April 10. At their farthest point, the crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a new distance record for humans in space.
That mission succeeded because the engineers who built Orion and SLS and ran Mission Control were, largely, still there when it needed to fly. The workforce reductions that hit those same programs after the mission began — and which have since been confirmed by the GAO to have produced skill gaps in the programs responsible for what comes next — are a different problem.
In February and March 2026, Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a fundamental restructuring of the Artemis architecture: Artemis III, originally planned as the first crewed lunar landing since 1972, was converted into a low Earth orbit docking test. Work on the Gateway — a planned small space station in lunar orbit that would have supported sustained surface operations — was paused. Two Artemis-related projects are already reporting technical and programmatic risks that were likely to delay their schedules, even before those programs fully absorb the costs of restructuring.
The GAO observes that implementing a fundamental architecture change — which requires every affected program to renegotiate its cost and schedule baselines from scratch — is precisely the moment when the human capital lost in 2025 is most acutely needed.
A Hiring Push Running Against a Budget Proposal
NASA is not passive in the face of these findings. In February 2026, Isaacman announced the agency would resume hiring after the extended freeze and would develop a plan to rebuild its civil servant technical core. In March 2026, he launched NASA Force in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management — a program designed to recruit engineers and technologists from industry for approximately two-year term appointments at the agency. The NASA Force website opened in April 2026, with applications targeting early- and mid-career aerospace engineers, software engineers, and systems technologists.
OPM Director Scott Kupor told NOTUS that NASA would also look to replace many roles previously outsourced to contractors with government staff — a structural shift Isaacman has identified as critical to rebuilding institutional capability.
But the recovery effort faces a direct headwind from the same administration that ordered the reductions. The White House’s FY2027 budget proposal, released in April 2026, requests $18.8 billion for NASA — a 23 percent cut from the $24.4 billion Congress enacted for FY2026. Within that figure, the science budget faces a proposed reduction of nearly 47 percent — a figure that would cancel DAVINCI and more than 50 other missions. The GAO is direct on the implication: the budget proposal “contributes to the ongoing uncertainty as to whether NASA will be able to hire the workforce needed to address skills gaps.”
Congress has pushed back. The House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee advanced a proposal in April 2026 keeping NASA at the $24.4 billion FY2026 level — rejecting the White House’s request — and the full committee passed that proposal 32–28 on a party-line vote in May. More than 100 House members had already signed a bipartisan letter in March 2026 requesting a 25 percent increase — to $9 billion — for NASA’s science programs alone. Both chambers rejected a nearly identical FY2026 proposal and funded NASA at its prior-year level, according to SpaceNews.
The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee is expected to weigh in next. Whether the final FY2027 figure lands closer to $18.8 billion or $24.4 billion will determine whether NASA Force’s recruitment effort has a budget to build on.
Does What Congress Does Next Actually Matter for These Missions?
Yes — directly, and in multiple directions at once. Flat funding at $24.4 billion preserves the headcount NASA Force needs to refill and keeps programs like DAVINCI and NEO Surveyor alive. A cut to $18.8 billion would cancel those missions and make rebuilding the civil servant engineering bench structurally impossible alongside any realistic timeline for Artemis IV’s planned first crewed lunar landing in 2028. The GAO has now stated explicitly — for the first time with workforce data to support it — that the two risks (budget and staffing) are connected: hiring cannot recover without the budget to support it, and the budget cannot be efficiently executed without the workforce to manage it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many NASA employees were laid off in 2025, and which centers were hit hardest?
NASA lost approximately 4,000 civil servants — about 22 percent of its total workforce — through two rounds of the federal Deferred Resignation Program in 2025, according to the GAO report. The sharpest losses fell on Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which shed 34 percent of its civil servants; Langley Research Center and Kennedy Space Center were next in severity. Other field centers reported reductions between 16 and 28 percent. NASA Headquarters reduced by 11 percent. The departures were formally voluntary — employees accepted separation packages and deferred departure dates — rather than involuntary layoffs.
Which NASA missions are most at risk from the engineering skill gaps the GAO identified?
The GAO’s report named four missions with documented staffing consequences as of mid-2026. DAVINCI, the Venus atmosphere probe, canceled risk-reduction activities after losing engineers and program managers. The Near Earth Object Surveyor, the congressionally mandated asteroid-detection telescope, lost program leadership and hands-on hardware staff at JPL. Orion, the crew capsule that flew on Artemis II, shed 10 percent of civil servants and has struggled to fill key roles. The Space Launch System rocket lost nearly 20 percent of its civil servants. The GAO specifically warned that the Psyche precedent — where one mission’s staffing shortfall produced a one-year delay and $132 million in additional costs — is now the structural template for risks embedded across the majority of the portfolio.
What is NASA Force, and can it actually replace the 4,000 engineers NASA lost?
NASA Force, launched March 3, 2026, by Administrator Jared Isaacman in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management, is a recruiting program that brings engineers and technologists from industry into NASA on roughly two-year term appointments that can convert to permanent roles. The program targets early- and mid-career aerospace, software, and systems engineers — not the senior specialists with decades of mission-specific experience who made up a significant share of the departures. Whether it can close the gap in time to matter for the Artemis architecture restructure — which requires programs to renegotiate baselines while managing new technical risks — remains the central question the GAO says it will monitor closely. The FY2027 budget outcome will determine whether NASA Force’s pipeline has positions to fill.
Could the asteroid-detection gap created by NEO Surveyor’s staffing losses actually put Earth at risk?
Congress enacted a specific mandate in 2005 requiring NASA to catalog 90 percent of all near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (459 feet) across — because objects that size can cause regional to continental devastation. NEO Surveyor is the primary tool designed to fulfill that mandate, particularly for dark asteroids that ground-based infrared and optical surveys cannot reliably detect. The JPL workforce losses documented in the GAO report hit the exact teams building the hardware for that telescope. A delay to NEO Surveyor directly extends the period during which a significant fraction of potentially hazardous asteroids remains uncharacterized. The telescope passed its Critical Design Review in February 2025 and is targeting launch no earlier than September 2027, with a contractual deadline of June 2028.
