NASA is rebalancing its workforce towards civil servants to bring more expertise in house, according to a Friday announcement from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
The new workforce directive is the result of Isaacman’s surveying of the workforce over his first 50 days in the job, including visiting every NASA center and holding a dozen town halls to hear directly from staff, he wrote on X.
“Getting back to the Moon means getting back to the basics,” he wrote. “NASA must regain its core competencies in technical, engineering, and operational excellence.”
Isaacman’s announcement follows the departure of ~4,000 NASA civil servants from the agency last year—or around 20% of NASA’s workforce—under the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program.
More details: Isaacman’s goal? Build NASA’s workforce up to reduce the reliance on contractors in NASA’s core areas. The idea is to make the agency more efficient—and save what Isaacman estimates is $1B in overhead each year added by the large contracting workforce.
In a memo, he laid out a series of next steps for the agency to tackle in the next 30/60 days.
The shorter-term, 30-day list includes:
- Evaluating NASA center and mission directorate workforces to find what technical experience has been outsourced.
- Making sure NASA can repair its own hardware (instead of relying on contractors) for all future programs.
The 60-day plans include:
- Drafting a transition strategy, including a process to rapidly onboard new civil servant employees.
- Finding a way to attract talent to the space agency from industry and academia.
- Establishing “makerspaces” at NASA centers to allow for rapid prototyping.
Never gone: Isaacman’s plan won’t eliminate NASA’s contractor workforce. Instead, it will ensure that NASA employees are working on the agency’s top goals—including engineering, operations, manufacturing, and science—while relying on contractors for short-term programs, surge needs, and lesser priorities.
