After the space community braced for a brutal shake-up at NASA this week, a last-minute decision on Tuesday (Feb. 18) spared over 1,000 agency employees on probationary status from being dismissed.
The news comes amid an aggressive push by the Trump administration and so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — spearheaded by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — to downsize the federal workforce. Thousands of federal employees across the government have been dismissed in ongoing mass layoffs since last Thursday (Feb. 13). That's a day after the Trump administration ended its "fork in the road" deferred resignation offer that gave the nation's 2 million federal workers the option of resigning and retaining pay and benefits through the end of September. More than 75,000 federal employees have accepted this offer, according to the White House, including hundreds at NASA.
