NASA Is in Full Meltdown

Career NASA officials were seen looking mighty freaked out during a recent town hall event about the agency's dicey future.

As Ars Technica's Stephen Clark reports based on a livestream of the town hall — which was not advertised and has since been taken down — acting NASA administrator and career agency official Janet Petro looked like a hostage as she answered questions from staff about the agency's dire standing under president Donald Trump.

The hostage-taker in this scenario appears to be NASA's newly appointed chief of staff Brian Hughes, who made his living as a consultant and politico in Florida until joining Trump's 2024 campaign.

According to a purported NASA employee who remarked about the town hall on a subreddit dedicated to the agency, Hughes at one point said he plans to "flatten our organization, refocus on the way we do business, and streamline the way we work." That big business-esque remark suggests that Trump administration plans to overhaul the entire institution and its culture.

Given what she's been forced to work with, Petro offered some optimistic equivocations about NASA's current status under an administration that plans to cut its budget by 24 percent and its headcount by one-third in the 2026 fiscal year, which starts in October.

"The NASA brand is really strong still, and we have a lot of exciting missions ahead of us," the acting administrator said. "So, I know it's a hard time that we're going to be navigating, but again, you have my commitment that I'm here and I will share all of the information that I have when I get it."

Along with staring down the barrel of those cuts, Petro may also have to serve out the rest of the year as an acting administrator. Despite her well-regarded reputation as the first woman to lead the Kennedy Space Center, Petro isn't tight with the Trump crowd and is unable to make big decisions for the agency — including about its forthcoming budget.

As Hughes suggested to the assembled staffers who asked about that massive staffing shortage, the White House seems disinterested in appointing a new administrator after rescinding the nomination of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire space tourist who Elon Musk put up for the job, over his past donations to Democrats.

"I think the best guess would tell you that it's hard to imagine it happening before the next six months, and could perhaps go longer than that into the eight- or nine-month range," the chief of staff said. "But that's purely speculation."

Besides being a key factor in Musk's fiery exit from government and the president's good graces, the Isaacman debacle also appears to have left a dark cloud over NASA as it sinks in to staffers that their treatment under Trump is a new normal.

One of the agency's leaders perhaps put it best when, in an interview with Ars on condition that their name be withheld, they succinctly quipped that "NASA is f**ked."

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