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4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

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Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#341

Post by poemxo »

samrus wrote: post #153

I understand wanting to make the organization more efficient, but i don't think this is what's happening here. I think this is the classic republican strat of gutting federal agencies, pointing to the inefficiencies caused by the loss of institutional knowledge, and using that as an excuse to privatize to their friends. The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up

This makes sense. A GS doesn't earn that much, but if they resign and go work for SpaceX and get paid as a contractor, doesn't this just cost the taxpayer more?

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#342

Post by LocalH »

DSingularity wrote: post #334
noobermin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not worth making this point anymore. Bannon et al have been explicit for decades now they want to destroy the federal government. It's ideological, that's it quite simply. All these discussions about efficiency, even more so the debt given they just blew up the debt to never before seen levels just shows that sincerity is not deserved when talking to Rs.

[flagged]

The current administration is fully on Israel's side of the conflict.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#343

Post by nosianu »

nosianu wrote: post #63
derriz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true or at least is not reflected by any statistics. Inequality, as measured by GINI has been falling both for the EU as a whole and within most European countries for decades now. The last decade in particular has seen declines in nearly all EU countries. Taking the EU on average the last time it increased was in 2014 - which is to be expected as the 2013 expansion allowed a number of relativel…

Gini does not give a full picture, it is just one measure. Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk". Headline: "Only the top four percent make it to the top in Germany." > Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota o…

> Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk".

I forgot the actual URL! It's German though. And a podcast (19. July 2025, 29 minutes) But it's good and quite thorough and has a lot of details, so if you understand German, it is worth a listen.

They say the "elite" is about 4,000 people in Germany, defined as those having significant and real influence in politics, law, media (highly concentrated ownership), business.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#344

Post by WalterBright »

notahacker wrote: post #224
brookst wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the ethical questions about working for a company that is privately owned by a megalomaniac who’s demonstrated an interest in playing king of the world.

And long before Elon took a turn for the political, taking a job with a company focused on launch and then satcomms constellations wasn't necessarily progression for someone wanting to scientific research into the composition of the asteroid belt or distant nebulae or design telescopes or Jupiter flybys or carry out longitudinal studies into astronaut health or climate change.

The launch capability is necessary and enabling for people who want to do such scientific research.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#345

Post by Fade_Dance »

nine_zeros wrote: post #194
samrus wrote: post #153

I understand wanting to make the organization more efficient, but i don't think this is what's happening here. I think this is the classic republican strat of gutting federal agencies, pointing to the inefficiencies caused by the loss of institutional knowledge, and using that as an excuse to privatize to their friends. The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up

[flagged]

The NC DMV situation was hilariously bad when I had a short stint there. Appointments were over a month out. People would come with camping chairs at 6:00 a.m. and hope to maybe get let in. People were there for many many hours and some people came back for many days on end.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#346

Post by WalterBright »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #202
verzali wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dumb take. NASA has (or had until Trump can back) plenty of interesting things. New Horizons, Europe Clipper, the James Webb, Hubble, Mars missions, ISS operations, human spaceflight, etc, etc are all being done by NASA workers. They do way more than just launch rockets and SpaceX can't even come close to the stuff NASA was doing.

James webb is the perfect example of why we absolutely need NASA and what they do. Did the budget balloon and delays rack up? Yup, and if you read about why you will see that it was basically unavoidable. A private business would have canceled it at the first roadblock (depriving us of an INCREDIBLE scientific tool). And for the actual launch and deployment, the cost of the instrument meant that a very high success r…

JWST is a great achievement. No question about that. But we could have easily made good use of a dozen of them. NASA could have built a dozen with only a small incremental cost, because once you have a design and tooling and test rigs and test plans and machine shop setups, the incremental cost is pretty small.

For example, when I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Stamping out a forging cost a few dollars. When I was putting together a stack of identical electronic circuit boards, the first one took 2 hours. The last one took 15 minutes.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#347

Post by ceejayoz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #338
DSingularity wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I'm inclined to see quite a bit of agency in the hands of both the US and Israel. The US absolutely can and should be doing more to pressure their ally, who they provide both very significant monetary and diplomatic support to.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#348

Post by nothercastle »

nine_zeros wrote: post #340
giantg2 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they can't even fill the positions they have under that cap. '“Whether the root cause is a lack of money, that’s still to be determined. Or whether it’s how we’re spending the money that’s already appropriated,” Boliek said.' From your article.

> Yes, and they can't even fill the positions they have under that cap. Yes, they can't even fill positions - that is how incompetent Republicans are.

If it cap salary at 2000 levels then that you won’t be able to fill. That’s happening all over the federal government. The pay is so low the only way the compensation works is if employees do the bare minimum

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#349

Post by mosesbp »

bix6 wrote: post #213
mosesbp wrote: post #154

Does anyone have access to a copy of the NASA statement on this that was shared with the media? It makes a big difference where in NASA these people were employed - this is the difference between slimming down an engineering division or cancelling one launch project and the total destruction of a smaller program for physics, which may have a much longer-term impact on US science.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/09/nasa-staff-departur... “You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society.

Thanks for this earlier article. From there it seems that the most staff losses are at Goddard, which is largely focused on science, not launch capabilities. So this unfortunately seems to fit into the larger “anti-science” push of the administration (e.g. the almost entirely senseless cuts at the NSF, NIH) more than it has to do with launch activities. Another dark day for US physics research…

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#350

Post by linuxhansl »

Great. The best, i.e. those who can easily find another job, are often those who often take these offers.

There were so many options to improve efficiency with technology and then simply not refilling some of the jobs (apparently there's a 5-6% yearly attrition in government jobs anyway.) But nooo... And obviously this was never what this was about.

A friend of mine worked for the White House under the Obama administration, with the first goal to digitize the VAs information. One of the Trump's first actions in 2016 was to end that. Shameful.

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