NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has announced another round of staff layoffs. The move, which began in mid-November, involves about 325 people, representing 5% of the lab’s employees. It follows layoffs in February of about 530 JPL staff and 140 of the lab’s outside contractors. According to JPL director Laurie Leshin, the second reduction in employees is occurring “across technical, business and support areas of the laboratory”.
JPL, which the California Institute of Technology runs for NASA, carries out many of the agency’s planetary exploration projects. These include the Europa Clipper mission, which launched in October, and the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers.
The earlier layoff at JPL stemmed from uncertainty over its budget for 2024. Indeed, the Mars Sample Return (MSR) has impacted JPL’s financial flexibility. The mission has experienced a series of delays and other problems and in October 2023 a NASA review board noted that the craft’s original price tag of $4bn had risen to $5.3bn. By April 2024 the estimated price had soared to $8-11bn and the date of the samples’ arrival on Earth extended to 2040.
US Congress has not yet settled on NASA’s budget for financial year 2025, which began on 1 October, but projections of likely spending on specific NASA institutions and programmes convinced JPL’s leadership to downsize. “With lower budgets and based on the forecasted work ahead, we had to tighten our belts across the board,” Leshin wrote in a memo to employees.
Leshin notes that the number of layoffs is lower than that projected a few months ago “thanks in part to the hard work of so many people across JPL”. She points out that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency earlier this month had no impact on the layoff decision. “[Even] though the coming leadership transition at NASA may introduce both new uncertainties and new opportunities, this action would be happening regardless of the recent election outcome,” she adds.
Leshin has reassured the lab’s staff that the current layoff should be the final one. “I believe this is the last cross-lab workforce action we will need to take in the foreseeable future,” she wrote. “After this action, we will be at about 5500 JPL regular employees. I believe this is a stable, supportable staffing level moving forward.”
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