Shift to moon-Mars focus affects 2,680 NASA jobs

About 15 percent of NASA's civil service workforce will be transferred or paid to leave by the end of fiscal 2006 as the agency focuses on President Bush's vision for exploring the moon and Mars.

More than 2,680 jobs will be affected as NASA transforms its labor force to support U.S. goals in space.

Officials delivered the news to NASA employees across the country in a closed-circuit broadcast Thursday. "This is about reshaping the workforce, more so than downsizing the workforce like we did in the 1990s," Associate Administrator James Jennings told reporters later.

On Friday, the agency's largest union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, attacked the plan as reckless and misguided. "It threatens the future viability of NASA, in our opinion," IFPTE legislative director Matthew Biggs told Government Executive. The union represents more than 8,000 NASA employees at five of the agency's 10 field installations.

In January 2004, President Bush laid out an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020, this time to stay, and to use the lunar base as a steppingstone to Mars. The plan marks the space shuttle for retirement in 2010, after NASA finishes building the International Space Station.

For more than a year, NASA has been studying how to match its workers' skills and experience with the new mission requirements. Agency leaders recently concluded that those with the wrong credentials must go. Officials are looking to refill some of the positions with experts in nuclear propulsion and power generation for deep-space expeditions.

Most of the superfluous jobs are in launch technology programs that NASA has canceled because they didn't fit the space exploration vision, and in the agency's aeronautics program, which is shrinking for the same reason.

The cuts are expected to come primarily from field installations in California, Ohio and Virginia. Jennings declined to reveal the list of installations and targeted positions until after officials approve them on May 1.

The individuals, yet to be identified, are on the agency's books as full-time equivalents. For the next year and a half, while strategists firm up details of the exploration plan, NASA will cover their salaries and benefits-worth about $268 million--from its general and administrative fund. Many workers may find new positions at field installations most involved in robotic and human exploration. For the time being, Jennings said, they are "gainfully employed" in strategic planning, program closeouts and scientific research.

Jennings predicted that less than a quarter of the group will be fired. He said NASA plans to rely on retirements and buyouts to thin the ranks. Reductions in force will be the last resort, he said.

NASA will offer a second round of buyouts at all 10 field installations next month with hopes of getting 400 takers. The first round in November and December was limited to five sites-Ames and Dryden Flight research centers in California, Glenn Research Center in Ohio, Langley Research Center in Virginia, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. That round yielded 314, far below the target of 450.

Up to 2,927 workers are eligible to retire through 2006. Many of them have been eligible for 10 years or longer.

At the same time it is shedding employees, NASA will undergo a brick-and-mortar makeover. It plans to close underused facilities and rid itself of other unneeded infrastructure. It will ask the field installations to adopt alternative management schemes such as university affiliations or federally funded research and development corporations. Beyond saying the agency is seeking input on "guidelines" for a variety of operational models, Jennings offered few details.

The changes are essential to NASA's success in carrying out the president's directive, Jennings said. "If we keep paying for all of those facilities that we don't need, we keep carrying people that we don't need," he said, "it just takes away money from the mission."

Biggs said the changes amount to a betrayal of the 2004 NASA Workforce Flexibility Act, which Congress passed to give the agency unprecedented authority to hire and retain talented people, and which the union endorsed. "If any agency in federal government screams for congressional oversight, it's NASA," he said. "NASA is spiraling out of control."