By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA on Friday said it received a one-week deadline extension to submit its plans for mass layoffs to the top U.S. personnel agency given the number of high-priority space missions the agency is grappling with this month.
Federal agencies faced a deadline of late in the week to turn in plans for workforce reductions and reorganizations, the latest phase of Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to trim back the federal bureaucracy.
“Considering a variety of agency priorities this week, including the launch of SPHEREx and PUNCH, as well as preparations for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 launch Friday, and other agency missions, the agency received a one-week extension on our initial submission,” a NASA spokesperson said.
NASA and SpaceX have a high-profile launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Friday in a mission that will allow the return of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two veteran astronauts who have been stuck on the station since last summer because of problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
The Trump administration’s deadline extension for NASA is the latest temporary reprieve for the space agency from mass layoff efforts, after firings of probationary employees in an earlier phase last month were abruptly averted at the eleventh hour.
Hundreds of NASA employees have taken the Trump administration’s buyout offer, a White House effort to encourage employee departures that is being challenged in court. And the U.S. space agency this week terminated three offices, including its Chief Scientist role, which led to layoffs of 23 staff of its workforce of roughly 18,000.
Looming additional layoffs and plans to substantially reshape NASA, according to agency employees, have triggered unease among many workers at an agency focused heavily on high-stakes missions with astronauts in Earth’s orbit, private companies landing on the moon and advanced research into the origins of life and our solar system.
The launch on Friday, NASA’s Crew-10 mission, has faced pressure from President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, to launch quickly in order to return from space Wilmore and Williams, whose drawn-out mission Trump has blamed on former President Joe Biden without evidence.
The Crew-10 mission will fly two U.S. astronauts, as well as one from Japan and another from Russia. Their arrival later on Saturday will allow Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth since they had their Starliner test trip turned into a full-duration mission on the ISS.
Propulsion system issues during Starliner’s June flight to the orbital laboratory – its first with a crew on board – forced NASA to decide last year to bring the capsule back empty, and have Wilmore and Williams return to Earth with a different crew this month using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Leslie Adler and Diane Craft)
