You can add Thousands of employees left NASA as another name for the Trump administration, cutting the budget by 25%.
On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her position on Friday, August 1 as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Lystrup has held the top position in Goddard since April 2023, overseeing employees of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees, and had a budget of approximately $47 billion last year.
These figures make Goddard the largest of NASA’s 10 field centers, mainly dedicated to the scientific research and development of robotic space missions, with budget and workforce comparable to NASA’s human space flight centers in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Goddard officials manage the telescopes of James Webb and Hubble in space, while Goddard Engineers are assembling the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled to be released late next year.
“We thank Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work inspiring explorers, scientists and engineers in the Golden Age,” Vanessa Wyche, acting deputy administrator at NASA said in a statement.
Goddard deputy director Cynthia Simmons will take over as acting director of the Space Center. Simmons began working as a contract engineer at Goddard 25 years ago.
Lystrup came to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of BAE Systems, where she managed the company’s work on NASA and other federal agencies’ civilian space programs. Prior to joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup received his PhD in astrophysics from University College London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.
Makenzie Lystrup has a panel discussion with Agent Center Directors at the Artemis Supplier Conference in Washington, D.C. in 2024.Courtesy of Joel Kowsky/NASA
Formal objection
The news that Lystrup left Goddard came hours after an open letter sent to NASA interim administrator, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former agency employees. The letter is a “Traveler Declaration” and identifies what the signatories call “the recent policy of wasting public resources, undermining human security, undermining national security and undermining NASA’s core mission.”
“The major programmatic transformation of NASA must be implemented strategically in order to manage risks carefully,” the letter reads. “Instead, changes in the past six months have been rapidly and wasted, which has undermined our mission and has had a catastrophic impact on NASA’s workforce. We are forced to speak when our leadership takes priority over human security, scientific advancement and the political momentum of effective use of public resources.”
The letter was established on similar documents written by employees who protested against and policy changes at the National Institutes of Health and Environmental Protection Agency.
