According to Census Bureau data, Greenbelt is home to over 1,350 federal workers. That’s estimated to be over 14 percent of residents, according to 2023 data. In addition to those civil servants, a lot of residents are government contractors. Many of those work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), considered to be in Greenbelt. The campus has a Greenbelt address but sits just outside the incorporated city limits. NASA has seen Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staff at their headquarters (HQ) in Washington, D.C., over recent weeks and is preparing for a Reduction in Force (RIF).
Cuts to SMD
“The last two weeks at NASA HQ was just consumed with a parade of reporting requests to justify and re-justify and justify again NASA grants and contracts. The most recent request, by far the most demanding to date, arrived Thursday [March 13] and is focused on grants specifically to academic institutions,” one Greenbelter who works at NASA headquarters told the News Review. “The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has been asked to plan for a 60 percent budget reduction,” said the source. SMD accomplishes its work through nationwide grants and contracts to a variety of institutions, the source shared, though they believe the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Langley Research Center, Ames Research Center and, importantly for Greenbelt, GSFC would bear the brunt of such cuts. Reports say the SMD budget is slated to be cut by “up to 50 percent” and have been published by multiple news organizations, though the White House’s plans have not yet been publicly released nor that figure confirmed by the Trump administration.
Impending RIF
On February 26, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies outlining guidance on implementing DOGE’s Workforce Optimization Initiative and emphasizing preparations for large-scale RIFs and reorganization plans must be made. Phase 1 plans were to be submitted by March 13, Phase 2 by April 14 with implementation to take place by September 30. NASA responded with the pressing tasks they were currently involved in and essentially said their workforce was too busy to create the plan in time. They received a one-week extension, making their initial deadline March 20. However, RIF planning has been going on behind closed doors at the agency, the News Review was told by a resident who works there. No RIF plans had been available to employees as of Tuesday, nor had the GSFC union GESTA been able to share anything on RIF planning, we are told.
DOGE at NASA
Two Greenbelt sources at
NASA’s HQ confirmed the presence of DOGE staff at the site. Riley Sennott, a 26-year-old DOGE employee, who also works with Elon Musk’s company Tesla, has been seen walking the halls of NASA HQ and meeting with NASA leaders there. In addition to information from a Greenbelt source, Sennott’s presence at NASA HQ was recently confirmed when his Google Calendar, tied to a personal email account, was discovered to be public and details were published by Business Insider. Alexander Simonpour is a second DOGE employee, previously of Tesla, said to be at NASA, with intentions to participate in RIF meetings this week, according to our source and to the blog NASA Watch (nasawatch.com), run by NASA journalist and former employee Keith Cowing.
Use of AI
A NASA worker speaking to the Greenbelt News Review said Sennott has been “combing through NASA systems for several weeks and feeding data into the Grok AI tool.” The work justifications that have been repeatedly demanded are also being fed into that tool, we’re told. Grok AI is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. It is publicly available for use through an X (formerly Twitter) subscription.
Compliance
Leaders at NASA are said to be “compliant.” In addition to justifying contracts and work, GSFC Director Makenzie Lystrup, who was appointed in 2023, is likely working to fulfill requirements while staving off threats to the Goddard center. According to our source and to a report published in The Hill in January, one of the cost-saving measures suggested by the Trump administration’s NASA agency transition team was closing GSFC and consolidating it with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Forbidden Words
As with other government agencies, compliance means removing now-forbidden language from contracts, proposals and agency documents. Last week, NASA received a new list of terms (see box) that were to be removed by March 17. Staff were directed to “thoroughly read” all of their contracts, task orders and statements of work to ensure all DEIA information and terms were scrubbed. Words to look out for are not limited to “diversity” and “inclusion.” Staff were also advised to check for terms like “historically,” “environmental justice” and “socioeconomic.” Among the many new key terms now forbidden are “black,” “clean energy,” “mental health,” “status” and even “orientation,” a term frequently used in aerospace to talk about the direction in which something is pointing.
