NASA Goddard’s shrinking workforce could stifle future space missions, experts say

After brutal cuts, can this NASA center still build multibillion-dollar space telescopes?

2025 was a brutal year of budget cuts and workforce attrition at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the home base for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Experts worry Goddard—and NASA’s space science—may never recover

After a successful late-August launch , the $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is cruising to its final orbit about a million miles from Earth . If all goes well, NASA’s latest “flagship” observatory will be sending back unprecedented cosmic panoramas and revolutionary images of exoplanets by the end of the year.

Like its predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope , Roman was designed and built primarily at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. But some current and former Goddard workers say NASA would not be able to build another telescope like Roman today. There aren’t enough people or pieces of equipment left.

Budget cuts and workforce reductions by the Trump administration have arguably hit Goddard the hardest out of NASA’s 10 research centers. From March 2020 to January 2025, a period that included U.S. DOGE Service layoffs and several rounds of early retirements in 2025, Goddard lost 40 percent of its personnel, shrinking from 10,000 federal workers and contractors down to 6,000. Since then managers have hired back 600 workers. In addition, NASA shut down several testing and technology development labs and broke up engineering teams, making work more difficult for those who remain.

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Goddard’s diminution is part of a broader pivot at NASA as the White House redirects the space agency to put American astronauts on the moon by 2028. Budget proposals for the past two years have slashed NASA’s science funding , and some of the nation’s best and brightest minds have now left the space agency because of uncertainty about their role in its future. According to a July 23 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), NASA lost a fifth of its civil servant workforce in the past year, with impacts to more than two dozen major projects. “The civil servant departures have left NASA’s workforce out of balance with NASA’s programmatic needs,” the report said.

NASA’s hardest hit centers were Goddard, its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Combined, the three had 14 space exploration missions that were proposed to be canceled or delayed, the report stated.