Hundreds of NASA employees across the United States have accepted deferred resignation offers as the space agency’s workforce in the Houston area braces for potential cuts.
Employees nationwide responded to President Donald Trump’s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer before the Feb. 12 deadline, Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokesperson based in Washington D.C., told Houston Public Media. The offer would give federal employees benefits and pay through the end of September — or they can risk being laid off entirely.
Employees at the Johnson Space Center near Houston were spared from an expected round of layoffs while the agency was in negotiations with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, according to multiple news reports. It was unclear Thursday if or when cuts to NASA would take place.
Trump’s administration last week directed federal agencies to lay off most probationary employees who had not gained civil service protection. The sweeping cuts have already laid a target on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
Warner said this week that the agency is working “as quickly as possible” to comply with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s direction.
“The agency is in the process of validating hundreds of employees who responded to the deferred resignation offer before the deadline,” she said in a statement. “Some probationary employees have taken the deferred resignation offer and those individuals have been, or will be, on administrative leave by the end of the week.”
The agency is working with the personnel management office on exemptions for probationary employees in mission-critical functions, Warner said.
A Houston-based NASA spokesperson would not say how many Johnson Space Center employees signed resignation offers, or even how many employees at the center are currently in probationary periods.
Probationary employees, who typically have worked less than a year, have fewer employee rights than other federal employees. Those employees may be let go without notice or severance.
There are more than 1,000 probationary employees across the agency’s 10 field centers and headquarters, about 6% of the agency’s workforce, according to Ars Technica.
The agency’s Texas branch has more than 11,800 civil servants and contractors, according to the Texas comptroller’s office. The Johnson Space Center facility, located just east of Houston, is responsible for managing human spaceflight operations.
In a Tuesday morning email to some employees, which was shared with Houston Public Media, a Johnson Space Center division manager mentioned “rumors in the media regarding federal government employees, and NASA probationary employees in particular.”
“Today promises to be full of distractions,” the email read. “Please keep an eye on yourself and your coworkers.”
Talks of a larger reduction in force at the agency have emerged in the background.
The reduction was outlined in a Feb. 11 directive from the agency, which said it could be implemented “in a manner that minimizes adverse impact on employees and limits disruptions to critical agency missions, programs, operations, and organizations, consistent with employees’ assignments and displacement rights,” according to an online NASA document.
The directive could review all senior executive service positions considered in the action to determine “how each may be affected along with a plan to address and minimize negative impacts to agency missions and operations.”
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