The second round of deferred retirements for NASA employees ended on Friday, and the agency reports that approximately 3,000 employees have submitted their resignations, according to Bloomberg. The Trump administration first offered a deferred retirement program as a buyout for government employees in January, when the DOGE (then headed by Elon Musk) was reducing the federal workforce by offering employees the option to resign while continuing to receive benefits and pay for a certain period of time. In the previous round, 870 NASA employees reportedly decided to leave. The space agency opened the second round in June, with a deadline of July 25.
According to a statement provided to Bloomberg, the latest batch of applications brought the total to nearly 4,000 employees, which is roughly 20 percent of NASA’s workforce. This comes after Politico reported earlier this month that more than 2,000 senior NASA employees had agreed to resign.
NASA is struggling with proposed budget cuts that could cripple the agency’s science programs and lead to the loss of thousands of jobs. A group of current and former NASA employees called on interim administrator Sean Duffy to reject the “harmful cuts” in a letter published on July 21, writing that the recent policy “threatens to waste public resources, endanger human safety, weaken national security, and undermine NASA’s core mission.”
