When asked how many NASA workers agreed to the Trump administration’s plan to buy the agency out, Petro responded that it was “hundreds.”
NASA’s interim administrator Janet Petro announced on Wednesday that hundreds of agency workers had agreed to a government buyout offer and that Elon Musk’s government efficiency group will look into the agency’s spending.
https://dogecoin.com/DOGE is scheduled to arrive. On the fringes of a space industry convention in Washington, Petro, the former administrator of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, told reporters, “They’re going to look—similarly (to) what they’ve done in other agencies—at our payments and what money has gone out.”
When asked how many NASA workers agreed to the Trump administration’s plan to buy the agency out, Petro responded that it was “hundreds.”
In an effort to reduce federal expenditure that the organization believes is excessive, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, has agitated the federal bureaucracy in recent weeks by gaining access to government payment and personnel systems.
NASA has contracts worth around $15 billion with SpaceX, mostly for the company’s Starship rocket, which will be used to land humans on the moon and transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
When asked if Musk’s DOGE leadership creates conflicts of interest at NASA, Petro responded that “we have very strict conflict of interest policies,” adding that any DOGE employee would be screened for conflicts by the agency’s legal office.
NASA’s diverse space mission and science programs, which account for about $24 billion of the agency’s yearly budget, are already being scrutinized by a small group of Trump administration officials, and Petro has been assigned to carry out Trump’s slew of executive orders that aim to end government diversity programs.
“All the officials in charge are really trying to wrap our heads around all the executive orders as they’re flying at us,” Petro stated.
With Musk and Trump publicly praising possible trips to Mars, the future of NASA’s premier space program to put humans on the moon has been called into question.
One possible cost-cutting target for DOGE is NASA’s overbudget moon rocket, the Space Launch System, but this objective will undoubtedly be complicated by the rocket’s workforce in Republican-majority states.
