Not long before he decided to leave NASA, Steve Rader, an engineer who spent 36 years at the Johnson Space Center, held a retreat for leaders in his department at his home in downtown Houston. It had been a trying few months for Rader and his team. “I will say, I don't cry a lot,” he tells me in a recent phone call. That changed after Trump took office. “You can ask my wife, from the first few months I cried.”
After decades working on projects like the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, Rader had, since 2021, been leading an office on open innovation, tasked with bringing outside ideas and talent into NASA. But in the early days of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Affairs (DOGE), the atmosphere inside the agency was heavy with sadness and paranoia. Everyone was thinking of leaving, afraid they were going to be fired, or both. “It was crazy,” Rader says. “Every day, some new person would be like, ‘Oh, just message me on Signal.’ It became the de facto way people talked.”
By the time Rader met with his leaders last winter, an email had already gone out offering more than 2 million federal employees, including those at NASA, the option to resign while still getting paid through September. Rumors were swirling that the president was planning to impose huge cuts to NASA spending. At the same time, no one was really talking at work about their own plans. “I think leaders especially didn't want to influence other people into leaving,” Rader said.
That’s what made what happened next so shocking. There were 10 people at Rader’s apartment. They were, in his description, “the hardcore NASA people”—the kind of ultra-qualified, hyper-driven leaders who could work anywhere, for just about any salary, but still chose the federal government. Right at the start of the meeting, half of them announced they were leaving. Some of them, like Rader, were near retirement. Others were much younger, members of what should have been the next generation of NASA leadership. “One of them, her and her family are moving to Costa Rica,” Rader says. “That's how scared she is of what's going on.”
As the winter bore on, more and more top officials walked out the door. “A lot of them tried to hang on for a long time, but most of them are gone,” Rader said. Eventually, Rader himself decided to pull the plug. He retired from NASA in February. He’d already been thinking about stepping away sometime in the next couple of years. But the changes at Trump’s new NASA accelerated his timeline. “I've gotten to know people all around the agency throughout the years,” he says. “And I just started hearing these reports, and it was like, I don't want to be a part of this.”
This isn’t politics, Rader says, not for him, not for the vast majority of his colleagues. If you work at NASA long enough, you get used to swings of ideology and priorities as different administrations come and go. This is something bigger, something unprecedented. “It was NASA's being deconstructed,” Rader says. The American space agency—the one that put humans on the moon, that landed robots on Mars, that sent a probe past Jupiter into the Kuiper Belt and beyond—was being taken apart.
“It's just very sad, and it's kind of pointless,” Rader says. “And I think they're going to look back at it in a couple of years, maybe less, and go, ‘Oh my gosh, what did we do?'”
No one I spoke to for this piece thinks NASA is literally going away. For one thing, Congress is pushing back on the changes, though the administration seems determined to ram them through one way or another. Instead, what they imagine is a kind of rump agency. “The sense that I got was, it was a very real possibility that NASA could be reduced to something just kind of in name only,” Rader says. “Almost maybe a version of the FAA (the Federal Aviation Administration), but for space.”
What’s being undercut isn’t just NASA’s technical ability to carry out missions, although that would be bad enough. It is America’s—and the world’s—capacity to wonder, to believe, to know. “It's almost like a diminution of our own vision and ambition to say we're literally, I mean, again, not figuratively, literally, closing our eyes to the cosmos and turning inwards,” says Casey Dreier, the space policy chief at the nonprofit Planetary Society. “It's like witnessing a death of an ideal.”
That death is already underway. Around 4,000 NASA staffers are scheduled to leave the agency this year, either through what the Trump administration calls “deferred resignation”—a kind of delayed, voluntary layoff—or what NASA is branding “normal attrition,” which includes people like Rader who are leaving of their own accord. That represents about a quarter of the agency’s total staff and includes more than 2,000 senior leaders, according to a report in Politico.
(In a statement, Cheryl Warner, NASA’s news chief, said safety “remains a top priority for our agency as we balance the need to become a more streamlined and more efficient organization and work to ensure we remain fully capable of pursuing a Golden Era of exploration and innovation, including to the moon and Mars.”)
The administration, meanwhile, has proposed a 2026 NASA budget that would slash overall agency spending by 24 percent and science spending specifically by almost half. “This is the largest single-year cut as a percentage ever proposed to NASA,” Dreier says. “It would bring NASA’s overall resources, adjusted for inflation, down to a level not seen since before the first humans went into space in 1961.”
The Trump proposal projects a frozen NASA budget until at least 2030 even as the administration touts a new “golden age of innovation and exploration.” To cap it off, NASA has been without a full-time administrator—the agency’s top official—since January. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary and a former champion lumberjack and Real World cast member, has been doing double duty in the role on an interim basis since July.
Much has been written about what the proposed budget cuts and job losses will do to NASA. To begin with, they would mean the end of 41 planned or current missions, according to the Planetary Society. Those include an audacious, and long-underway plan to gather pristine soil samples on Mars and return them to earth, a probe exploring the solar system beyond Pluto, and a lander set to catch and study a giant asteroid that will barely miss the earth in 2029. They would also force NASA to essentially get out of the business of tracking climate change.
In a statement to WIRED, Duffy said, in part, that NASA “remains committed to (its) mission” and that the agency “retains a strong bench of talent … capable of executing upon my directives safely and in a timely manner.”
But few of his employees seem to believe that’s true. In July, more than 300 NASA staffers signed a public letter of dissent addressed to Duffy. Titled “The Voyager Declaration,” the missive decried the “rapid and wasteful” changes of the past six months, that have “undermined (NASA’s) mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce.”
I’ve been writing about Trump since the Iowa Caucuses in 2016. I’ve become used to the idea of bad news—of cruelty, incompetence and needless suffering. I know NASA cuts are not the worst thing happening under his administration. (Foreign aid cuts could resurrect the AIDS epidemic; children are being locked up in immigration jails; Medicaid is now at risk for millions.) But slashing NASA seems to represent something different and more ethereal to me. It’s less an accretion of new bad, perhaps, than an absence not just of good but of the possibility of good.
What depresses me most, as a non-American, is what seems like the end of the American desire to look outward, just to look. One of the great pleasures of my life since the late days of the pandemic has been to lose myself in the images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Like so many others, I was living what felt like a tiny life back then. Everything was enclosed. Everything felt fractured. The highlight of my days, day after day, was a walk, by myself, through empty streets. James Webb, launched at the end of 2021, seemed like such a deliberate act of reaching out. It had an unabashed, unqualified bigness. It was proof that together we could still do incredible things.
I’m not a science journalist. I’m not even a committed space guy. (I’ve always been a different kind of nerd, more novels and tote bags than slide rules and telescopes.) But I have found something deeply, gloriously human about the images I’ve seen from Webb. Every time a new batch gets released, I find myself staring at them with something near spiritual awe. Sombrero Galaxy. Phoenix Cluster. Cat’s Paw Nebula. They all exist in these infinite, depthless swirls—beautiful proof that if we want to we can look and look forever and always find something new to see.
That looking is what has allowed NASA to build itself as a brand in the global imagination. “Not to do too much play on the Make America Great logo,” Rader tells me. “But it is indisputable that one of the things that makes America great in many, many people's minds all around the world is that we have and pay for NASA.” I, a Canadian, have a NASA Mars rover bumper sticker on my car. (Sorry Canadian Space Agency). Sixty-seven percent of Americans, meanwhile, viewed NASA favourably in 2024, according to Pew Research, including 62 percent of Republicans. That ranks behind only National Parks and the Postal Service in terms of bipartisan approval.
I bought that bumper sticker after watching—along with, to date, more than 17 million others—NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars in February 2021. Perseverance has been roaming the landscape of the Jezero Crater ever since, extracting soil samples aimed at finding proof of extraterrestrial life. The Trump administration, as part of a wholesale abandonment of Mars Sample Return, wants to strand those samples where they are. “The value of these, I think, is inescapable, and they are sitting there in tubes,” Harry “Hap” McSween, who has spent decades working with NASA on Martian exploration, tells me. “I'm trying not to be depressed about it, but it's hard to see something that you've worked so hard for put on the back burner, at least, if not not to be done at all.”
The worry is that the damage being caused now, not just to the brand, but to the actual agency, is permanent. NASA is already losing its reputation as a place brilliant people can go, not to make the most money or get the best stock options, but to work on things no one else has done. Rader spent years helping perfect the software required to transfer data seamlessly between NASA teams on the ground and in space. He spent some of his final days at NASA complying with one of Trump’s executive orders. “I had to go into my employees’ job descriptions and delete the words “diversity” and “inclusion,” he says.
By and large, the scientists and senior leaders fleeing NASA now—voluntarily and not—won’t come back. They’ll go to the private sector. They’ll go to other countries. They’ll take what’s left of America’s dwindling capacity to inspire with them. “We had built something, have built something, as a nation so unique in the course of history,” Dreier says. “It's kind of astonishing, when you think about it, the level of not just ambition, but willingness to say, we're going to go and figure out what the universe looked like within years of its existence. Or we're going to land a car-sized rover on Mars. Or we're going to go to the furthest outreaches of the solar system and then some. And why? Not for domination, not for glory, but for this joint collective desire to know our cosmos better.”
One of my favorite images from the James Webb Space telescope is of the Southern Ring Nebula. Released in the summer of 2022, the picture seems almost contained at first. It's an ocean-blue egg surrounded by halos of orange dust and gas. But zoom in and entire galaxies appear: infinite pinpricks of light set off against a kind of colossal orange cloud. I see in that picture the best of what NASA was and the opposite of what it risks becoming. It is an ambition at once humble and endless, rooted in the idea that we can learn anything, see anything, but we will never know everything. There’s too much of it. It is too vast.
