The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.
(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)
Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.
The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.
Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.
It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.
Not saying I agree with the cuts, just pointing out there may be a silver lining.
Difficult to plan the usual when the White House is proposing -$6B and the House / Senate are not functioning. And they all got emails paraphrased as "get out while you can."
Minor nitpick, the budget amount really seems to depend where you look. Per USASpending.gov, supposedly "the official open data source of federal spending information", FY 2025 Obligated is $9.4 trillion as of August 30th. FY 2024 was $9.7 trillion. FY 2019 was when it was $6.6B. [1]
However, your numbers are closer to the numbers from the Treasury that say $7 trillion was spent so far this year. [2] Treasury actually mentions USASpending by name and notes "Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."
Differences between them:
Social Security 23% 16.30%
Medicare 14% 18.30%
Health 14% 11.60%
Net Interest 14% 12.30%
National Defense 13% 15.90%
Income Security 10% 6.70%
Veterans Benefits and Services 5% 4%
Transportation 2% 1.70%
Natural Resources and Environment 1% 1.20%
Administration of Justice 1% 1%
General Government 4.2%
Education, Employment, Training 1.9%
and Social Services
Other 2% 4.90%
SUM 99% 100.00%
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
>> What surprised me was that initial budget request, which basically said, we, America, are never going to launch another space telescope. We're going to turn off 95% of the ones we have in orbit. We are getting out of that business, we don't want to ask those questions anymore.
So this hits on a few key points. It’s not just that this budget request is tossing out perfectly good technology maturation plans for getting the next large space telescope built (https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/habitable-wor...), among other goals.
It’s also (see the second sentence) that the budget request will result in de-orbiting perfectly-functioning operational missions like OCO-2 (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/), and deactivating perfectly functional instruments onboard ISS that are returning data continuously right now. It’s a multi-billion dollar self-own. There’s no sense in it. (https://www.planetary.org/charts/fy-2026-active-mission-canc...).
For many of these missions, having a long-term continuous dataset is super-valuable —- obviously so for a CO2 monitoring mission, or missions monitoring land surface temperature, vegetation/forests, etc. They are built, launched, and returning data. It’s all gravy at this point.
As nearby commenters note, this has nothing to do with cost savings. It’s more like a mix of pure spite, owning some libs in Maryland and California, and an object lesson in who the boss is.
Roscosmos? Good joke sir. It's on brink of collapse due to sanctions, management and kremlin's priorities. A ghost from the past.
Somehow, my brain read that as `nerdtech`
The model was that NASA did stuff that was pathfinding, typically in response to science objectives, and that commercial applications would follow. By design, it’s not mass production.
This works for Earth science stuff like land surface monitoring, methane monitoring, land subsidence, groundwater monitoring, sea level rise, etc. NASA developed these remote sensing technologies that have made it into commercial applications.
So there is a synergy between NASA science and commercial space. It does not have to be either/or.