NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) — the country’s largest organization of Earth and space scientists, engineers, and technologists in Greenbelt, Maryland — is making drastic changes following severe budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.
According to an internal memo sent to staffers obtained by NASA Watch, the center is kicking off a “series of moves” that will “reduce our footprint into fewer buildings” as soon as this week.
The memo shows a surprising degree of urgency.
“Unlike previous large-scale Center reconfigurations, which occurred over a number of years, all planned moves will take place over the next several months and will be completed by March of 2026,” the memo reads.
The significance of the GSFC in the history of NASA can’t be overstated. It’s played a key role in the development of NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, alongside countless other key missions — yet its future is now uncertain as Trump moves to realign the agency’s goals away from science and toward space exploration.
In a statement, the GSFC said the downsizing plans were devised long before the Trump administration began slashing agency budgets this year.
“Goddard Space Flight Center leadership is taking the first steps this week at the Greenbelt and Wallops Flight Facility campuses toward moving into a right-sized footprint of office and technical space,” the center wrote in a statement to Futurism. “The transformation plan follows a 20-year Master Plan that was approved at the agency level in 2019 and has been guiding all campus infrastructure decisions since then.”
The Master Plan, which was developed during president Donald Trump’s first term, centers around meeting “affordability goals” while modernizing, demolishing, and renovating existing facilities.
Still, the timing of the memo is noteworthy. In its 2026 budget request, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget suggested cutting the space agency’s funding by 24 percent, effectively canceling dozens of current and future science projects and space missions.
It would be the biggest single-year drop in funding in the space agency’s history, erasing nearly half of NASA’s science budget. The GSFC itself could lose nearly half its roughly 1,700 civil servants.
Democratic lawmakers have warned that the cuts could have “irreversible impacts on America’s space leadership and capabilities.” And a report by a commercial lobbying group recently found that the brutal cuts at NASA are effectively abdicating its lead in the space race to China.
Whether the proposed changes will go into effect remains unclear even months after the budget was first released. A looming government shutdown currently has Congress racing to find stopgap measures to keep NASA funded.
The new fiscal year begins just over a week from now, but Congress has yet to pass its final budget. As Ars Technica points out, nobody knows for sure what would happen to NASA’s budget in the event of a government shutdown.
However, sources told the publication last week that interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy had directed the agency to work toward a far more lenient House Appropriations Committee budget bill, which would keep its funding level nearly identical.
But that’s far from a guarantee, leaving the fate of the space agency and the GSFC largely unknown.
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