Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who’s claim to intelligence is being on TV, is using the shutdown to gut the Goddard Space Flight Center while employees are furloughed. According to the Employee Union’s website, 13 campus buildings, housing around 100 laboratories are being shuttered with “extreme haste and with no transparent strategy or benefit to NASA or the Nation”, risking millions of dollars of unique and custom equipment and endangering high profile missions such as the Roman Space Telescope and the Dragonfly rotorcraft program. [i]
According to project scientists working on NASA's next generation Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is poised to rival the discoveries of predecessors like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, they were given only four days to empty a mission-critical laboratory. Their window to do so expires Wednesday (Nov. 12). [ii]
The current leadership of NASA has justified this action as part of the 20-yeat Master Plan to renovate and replace ageing NASA facilities. But on Sept. 22, Goddard Associate Center Director Raymond Rubilotta announced “a rapid acceleration of the Master Plan from 20 years to six months.”[iii] This is despite fact that the actual plan [iv] has as its first bullet to “Maintain Mission Capability”. According to the actual plan, facilities are to be shuttered only after new facilities are operational, common sense to everybody except the current administration.
Others suggest that Trump toadies are implementing his budget before Congress approval.
The implication, denied by the NASA officials in question, is that proposed cuts to NASA operations… are being implemented even as that budget remains under debate. If true, this would be an illegal overstep of the government's powers and an obvious end-run by the executive around the democratic process.[v]
And of course, Trump acolytes must use threats
In one instance, furloughed employees were given just days to temporarily return to work and help empty entire buildings of highly specialized equipment, according to sources and internal emails obtained by CNN. In the communications, NASA managers wrote that equipment not moved in time — including one-of-a-kind hardware — could be thrown away or donated[vi]
Office moves and similar are not approved activities during a government shutdown, and yet
On October 14, contractors and civil servants who worked in Buildings 19 and 20 were sent emails to their government accounts informing them to return and report by October 16 to pack and prepare for movers clearing the buildings the following week. The email stated that exempt status was approved to complete the moves from the building. “It is unclear how this rationale creates a scenario in which civil servants would be expected to be called from furlough status during a lapse in appropriations,” according to a GFSC employee.[vii]
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, ranking Democrat on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, sent a letter this week to Duffy demanding that NASA cease facilities closing at GSFC during the shutdown and halt consolidation activities.
The cost savings of this operation is nothing compared to the national budget. The 2024 budget for the entirety of NASA in 2024 was $25.4 Billion, about half of the US taxpayer money that Trump gave to Argentina in support of his rich buddies. Easy to see that this is all part of the show to lord dominance over things they do not understand or directly benefit from, things like weather prediction, aerosols, aerospace engineering, and space exploration. My guess is that Mr. Duffy’s science teachers did not like him either.
[i] https://www.gesta-goddard.org/blog/gestas-summary-of-goddard-building-closures-status
[ii] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/this-all-must-end-now-nasa-lab-closures-at-goddard-space-flight-center-under-congressional-scrutiny
[iii] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-flagship-science-center-during-the-government-shutdown-and-may-be-breaking-the-law-in-the-process
[v] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/nasa-goddard-center-scientists-stand-163032602.html
[vi] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/04/science/nasa-goddard-building-closures-government-shutdown
[vii] https://www.greenbeltnewsreview.com/news-stories/furloughed-workers-recalled-to-clear-buildings-at-goddard/
