The budget-cutters called astrophysicist Dr. Kartik Sheth and his colleagues in the chief scientist’s suite at NASA “low-hanging fruit,” which meant they were among the first to lose their jobs after President Trump signed a raft of executive orders to downsize the federal government. Sheth still has a hard time believing what has happened. He was highly touted as a role model, featured on NASA’s website talking to young people about galaxy formation and black holes, and as an invited speaker to share science discoveries at schools and institutions across the nation.
Everybody reporting to the chief scientist—an advisory position reporting in turn to the NASA administrator—was ordered out in 30 days. “When we asked what to do with ongoing projects, they just said to leave them—‘don’t worry, you don’t need to finish,’” Sheth told The Daily Beast. “We also were not allowed to move to other positions in the Agency even though we had significant experience and expertise in many facets of mission critical work.”
Sheth, 53, came to this country from India at 14 with his parents, excelled in school and earned a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. “The environment for people doing science is not good. It’s not just NASA,” he said of the Trump administration’s positions.
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Typically, when a new NASA administrator is appointed, they bring in a new chief scientist (of their choosing). As part of this turnover, roughly two dozen civil servants are reassigned within the agency, which has multiple centers and employs 18,000 people. It is totally out of the ordinary to lop off the entire Office of Chief Scientist and NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy.
Chief Scientist during the Biden administration was Katherine Calvin, a Stanford-trained expert who had taken an active role with the United Nations Climate Change Conference. She got the boot along with everybody in her office in an e-mail on March 10.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why all these talented people got riffed, which is convenient as there aren’t many left. “Our office provided data-driven analysis not based on politics, and this new administration doesn’t feel they need that kind of information or anything they disagree with,” former NASA senior technical advisor Ken Wright told The Daily Beast.
(“It’s policy and it’s personal,” added one former employee who did not want to be quoted by name.)
Wright had accrued almost 40 years of government service when he was confronted with involuntary retirement on March 10. He joined NASA right out of college and remembers the sense of devastation felt across the agency were after the Challenger space shuttle broke apart just over a minute after its launch in January 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. The mood today, he explained, is comparably terrible. “People were distraught then, but it was a different emotion,” he recalled. “Everybody was united and there was a lot of momentum around making things better in the future. This time, there’s no rhyme or reason.”
The guard rails are gone as NASA braces for what’s expected to be a 20 percent cut across the board and an even deeper cut of 50 percent to its space programs—even as its next administrator, billionaire Musk buddy and two-time SpaceX astronaut Jared Isaacson, promises America will establish a human presence on the moon and reach Mars in the foreseeable future. These cuts are seen, internally, as a veritable death knell for the agency’s work—and America’s ambitions in space science.
Musk has called the cuts “troubling,” and claimed that he has stayed out of the budget discussions because he has a conflict of interest with his SpaceX company—a major NASA contractor.
For Mamta Patel Nagaraja, working for NASA was “a childhood dream come true.” Nagaraja grew up in a small town in West Texas, wanting to go to space from an early age after an older sister turned her onto Sally Ride. She had been with NASA for 22 years, almost 25 if you count a post-college internship. After twice trying to be an astronaut herself, she settled for training them in her place, working at Mission Control in Houston and later Goddard Space Center located just outside Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland before being assigned to the office of the chief scientist.
Nagaraja told the Daily Beast that she is on the one hand glad to be out of the “toxic workplace,” but on the other has not come to terms with the circumstances. “I intended to retire from the organization,” she said. “I’ll never understand (being fired) and I’ll never be happy about it.”
So can the magic of NASA and space exploration survive the harsh measures imposed by Trump’s executive orders and DOGE’s demands? Probably not, given the administration’s head-in-the-sand approach to climate change, one of the most pressing issues facing the world. But NASA’s expertise stretches across many facets of science. What’s at stake, then, is the broader issue of trust in science—and how it must be allowed to roam free, not silenced because of ideology.
“I anticipate the time will come when they order me to compromise my scientific integrity,” said one highly-placed scientist who remains at NASA, for now. “(That’s) a line I will not cross.”
