Warum stellt die NASA 7.500 Auftragnehmer wieder als Beamte ein? | „Die Weisung des Verwalters ist eine kohärente und notwendige Vision für die Zukunft.“
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/why-is-nasa-bringing-7500-contractors-back-to-work-as-civil-servants/
14 Kommentare
>As a flight director during NASA’s Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston.
>Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust your colleagues in the trenches.
>“When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry,” Griffin said in an interview. “With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference.”
>This really happened in 1969. Griffin’s “Gold Team” in Mission Control led the launch of the Apollo 12 mission, when the ascending Saturn V rocket triggered lightning as it soared through electrically charged clouds. The lightning strike disrupted the Apollo spacecraft’s electrical systems, which flight controllers and astronaut Alan Bean scrambled to reset. The rocket and spacecraft survived, going on to complete the second lunar landing.
>During the Apollo era, Griffin said, contractors were brought in to supplement NASA’s workforce. But the positions in Mission Control remained NASA employees, and that was important because the space agency ultimately had responsibility—success or failure—for what happened during its missions.
>After he left NASA, that began to change. “Midway through the space shuttle era, I was surprised to find that a lot of the jobs in Mission Control had gone to contractors,” he said.
>Griffin doesn’t want to denigrate contractors. They play a critical role in extending the agency’s expertise for subsystems built for the space agency. But over time, often as a way to increase headcount at the space agency without raising the NASA civil service count, critical jobs were outsourced to contractors.
>This year, in a move that has largely gone under the radar, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to reverse this trend. As part of his “workforce initiative,” Isaacman is bringing 7,500 contract positions back into the agency, making them civil servants to rebuild what he calls “core competencies.”
>This is a massive shift in how NASA does business, and it’s not without controversy. But Griffin said he welcomes the change and believes it will be better for the agency in the long run. “I applaud Jared’s idea to get back to that kind of in-house capability and responsibility,” he said.
Now nationalize SpaceX, the space related parts, and you’ll really see the savings.
While bringing in a higher headcount and lowering reliance on contractors isn’t a silver bullet, it does ensure industry knowledge isn’t lost over time. There is massive value in having talent and knowledge owned by the public rather than a private company.
We can really see this at an extreme in the infrastructure world: we spend so many resources on ‚consulting‘ that would have otherwise just been done by competent, public employees.
People don’t realize that the federal government is absolutely hemorrhaging money by paying through the nose for contractors. Pretty much every technology related job is done through large contractors. Instead of paying $80,000 a year or what have you for an engineer, they pay Accenture or some other large consulting firm $250/hr for one. Glad to see NASA go the other direction and hope other agencies follow suit.
The Clinton administration really gutted NASA. Shifting back to a healthy civil servant workforce in the areas of NASA’s CORE MISSION (not admin, facilities, shipping and receiving, ect which account for the vast majority of NASA civil servant roles that survived the purge) will be a great way to future-proof the organization against a decline similar to the one experienced over the last generation.
All federal hiring just reopened. This isn’t unique to NASA. While this is one step forward, the slash and burn job cuts of the last 19 months set us back several steps. There was such a brain drain in addition to whatever perceived fat was being cut (and for those unaware, federal jobs were running pretty lean most places before it all started despite what envious grampy claims about lazy and inept people in them). The federal government is an understaffed mess from top to bottom and the recovery will take far longer than the purge.
Before you guys get excited, don’t forget the effects of those budget cuts.
NASA is gonna save a lot of money switching from contractors to civil servants. But they definitely don’t have the budget to keep all of them there.
This is gonna be a layoff disguised as a hiring spree. Most of the agency’s facilities are still struggling to recover and replace the people they lost in the DRPs. Now their workforce is getting thinned out again.
Why? Because 4,000 civil servants left NASA in 2025, as part of the DOGE-led DRP.
Edit: That goes alongside thousands of contractor workforce reductions in 2025, especially at Goddard and JPL. Plus the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to slash NASA’s budget by 25%, scraping huge swaths of funding for science missions.
„Bring them back“ is not a good way to put it. NASA is forcibly poaching these employees for less pay and worse benefits when nobody asked for it. They’re pointing a gun at the head of their own contracts and saying „don’t you want to replace the people we just purged? 🙂 we promise we won’t purge you too :))“
I’ll speak as someone who’s on this inside of this process:
The negatives: Communication was shit, definitely transparency issues due to how fast they were trying to make this happen (~2000 employees in 3 months at KSC), it was extremely chaotic on the HR side, expectations about pay were all over the place. Some people asked for the moon with their pay and got it early on, then with later phases they standardized everybody to step 1 of their respective GS level for pay. Between people choosing to retire early, people who didn’t want to work for the government/Trump administration, and H1B visas who couldn’t be hired on, we’re short 10-20% in terms of people they wanted to bring on board depending on who you ask/how you measure. Some processes on the government side are a bit more of a pain in the ass (FAR and DFARS in particular)
The positives: I’m working the same job, at the same desk, with a $10k raise, and now I get to say I work for NASA. Everyone’s pay stayed the same or went up. At the end of the day, a contracting company has a profit to make. The COMET contract has paid out ~$1.2 billion so far at KSC to contractors, so that’s $35+ million in overhead on a single contract that stays with NASA instead. Definitely a fan of the TSP and pension over my old company’s 401k. It hasn’t effected processing for Artemis 3 that much (we’re waiting on Axiom, SpaceX, and Blue so it wouldn’t matter even if it did). Some people changed job roles but 95% of people who wanted to keep their jobs got to, and the only people I know who’s roles disappeared were either redundant management or people who didn’t have super defined job roles. Oh and I get a discount at the big gift shop at the KSC visitor’s center and can get in for free! (that’s right, contractors didn’t get that benefit lol). That’s about as much as I can say without getting myself in trouble 🙂
My own journey with this process aside, it’s pretty wild how some crazy millionaire getting told „no you can’t buy an ICBM“ by Russia lead to me being a NASA employee, but I’ll take it.
Really interesting, did not know this! I support the move.
What I don’t often see discussed is that ever since Trump took office, civil servant positions now include a required essay prompting applicants to speak to how they would work to advance the *president’s* policies. Specifically:
*“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”*
It is blatantly illegal for civil servants to formally express partisanship and allegiance to the policies of any specific political figure. And yet, the very applications that OPM is putting out there are prompting them to do exactly that.
Hiring contractors into civil servant roles puts them into this murky position of being beholden to the current presidential administration instead of the country at large.
[https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2026/04/federal-job-applicants-cant-skip-loyalty-question-that-opm-says-is-optional-court-filings-claim/](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2026/04/federal-job-applicants-cant-skip-loyalty-question-that-opm-says-is-optional-court-filings-claim/)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[COTS](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9v6rk „Last usage“)|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)|
| |Commercial/Off The Shelf|
|[FAR](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9j5ny „Last usage“)|[Federal Aviation Regulations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations)|
|[GSFC](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9kufy „Last usage“)|Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland|
|[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9j5ny „Last usage“)|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9gxkx „Last usage“)|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[JSC](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9c54q „Last usage“)|Johnson Space Center, Houston|
|[KSC](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9j5ny „Last usage“)|Kennedy Space Center, Florida|
|[MBA](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9hqp0 „Last usage“)|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha|
|NRHO|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[NRO](/r/Space/comments/1wz7cem/stub/pe9p2ru „Last usage“)|(US) National Reconnaissance Office|
| |Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO|
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Wish Jarad cared about the people who lost their jobs due to this transition. Or those who took a severe pay cut.