You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut.
On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees and a budget last year of about $4.7 billion.
These figures make Goddard the largest of NASA’s 10 field centers primarily devoted to scientific research and development of robotic space missions, with a budget and workforce comparable to NASA’s human spaceflight centers in Texas, Florida, and Alabama. Officials at Goddard manage the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and Goddard engineers are assembling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled for launch late next year.
“We’re grateful to Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers,” Vanessa Wyche, NASA’s acting associate administrator, said in a statement.
Cynthia Simmons, Goddard’s deputy director, will take over as acting chief at the space center. Simmons started work at Goddard as a contract engineer 25 years ago.
Lystrup came to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of BAE Systems, where she managed the company’s work on civilian space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup earned a doctorate in astrophysics from University College London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.
Makenzie Lystrup at a panel discussion with agency center directors at the 2024 Artemis Suppliers Conference in Washington, DC.Courtesy of Joel Kowsky/Nasa
Formal Dissent
The announcement of Lystrup’s departure from Goddard came hours after the release of an open letter to NASA’s interim administrator, transportation secretary Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former agency employees. The letter, titled the “The Voyager Declaration,” identifies what the signatories call “recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”
“Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully,” the letter reads. “Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources.”
The letter is modeled on similar documents of dissent penned by employees protesting cuts and policy changes at the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We urge you not to implement the harmful cuts proposed by this administration, as they are not in the best interest of NASA,” the letter reads. “We wish to preserve NASA’s vital mission as authorized and appropriated by Congress.”
The signatories who chose to identify themselves don’t include any current senior-level NASA officials, and there’s nothing to suggest any link between the letter and Lystrup’s departure from Goddard.
Writing on the Wall
But it’s important to note that Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC, would suffer outsize impacts from the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts. The White House’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 asks Congress for $18.8 billion to fund NASA, about 25 percent below this year’s budget. Funding for NASA’s science directorate would be cut from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion, a reduction that would force the cancellation of dozens of NASA missions currently in space or undergoing development.
Appropriations committees in both houses of Congress advanced spending bills earlier this month that would restore NASA’s funding close to this year’s budget of nearly $25 billion. The budget bills must still be voted on by the entire House and Senate before going to the White House for President Trump’s signature.
Makenzie Lystrup was sworn in as a federal employee using Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.Courtesy of Keegan Barber/NASA
However, lawmakers are concerned the Trump administration might attempt to circumvent any congressional budget and move forward with more lasting cuts to NASA and other federal agencies through a process known as impoundment. This would likely trigger a court fight over the executive branch’s authority to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The administration is proceeding with offers to federal civil servants of early retirement, buyouts, and deferred resignation. NASA’s chief of staff, a Trump political appointee named Brian Hughes, said in a town hall meeting last month that the agency is operating under the assumption that the White House’s budget will become reality. So, the story is far from over.
Goddard’s work is intertwined with NASA’s science budget. Nearly 60 percent of Goddard’s funding comes from NASA’s astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics, and planetary science accounts—all nested within the agency’s science mission directorate.
Several NASA facilities operate under Goddard management, including Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility in West Virginia, White Sands Complex in New Mexico, and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas.
Another NASA facility girding for cutbacks is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research center managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL has been the architect of most of NASA’s robotic missions exploring the Solar System, such as the Voyager probes, a series of increasingly sophisticated Mars rovers, and most recently, the Europa Clipper mission that left Earth last year on the way to study the enigmatic icy moon of Jupiter.
JPL’s center director, Laurie Leshin, stepped down June 1 after ordering layoffs of more than 10 percent of the lab’s workforce last year, largely due to budget uncertainty over the future of NASA’s Mars Sample Return program. The Trump administration’s budget proposal calls for canceling the robotic Mars Sample Return program in favor of eventually bringing home rock specimens from the red planet on future human expeditions.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
