‘Catastrophic Impacts’: NASA Employees Join Parade of Agency Dissenters

“[T]he last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce,” reads the “NASA Voyager Declaration,” addressed to newly minted scaredy-cat interim administrator Sean Duffy and hosted once again by Stand Up For Science. It is signed, for the moment, by 131 named either current or former NASA employees, as well as 156 who signed anonymously out of fear of retribution — a very rational fear, given EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s apparent fervor to punish those who signed his agency’s Declaration of Dissent.

Stand Up For Science leadership confirmed to Splinter that almost all the signatories are current staff, though some have recently been fired thanks to Reductions in Force. Glancing through the list of names, one can find any number of roles at NASA — software engineers, optical physicists and engineers, research psychologists, flight center operations analysts, and so on. They enumerated seven items of “Formal Dissent,” as defined specifically in NASA’s procedural documentation, including changes to Technical Authority capacities, the closing of funded missions and “non-strategic” staff reductions, “indiscriminate cuts” to scientific research and various contracts, withdrawal from international cooperations, and elimination of DEI and other accessibility programs.

This is where the federal scientific enterprise has landed after a mere half year of the second Trump administration: employees at science-related agencies, at great personal risk given leadership’s vindictive nature, yelling publicly about that leadership’s ongoing attempts to ruin just about all of it.

“Employees across the agency have raised concerns about recent actions to NASA leadership, yet we remain pressured to implement harmful measures,” the Declaration reads. “The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire.”