The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA has announced in a memo that it will be laying off approximately 570 workers due to the lack of a federally approved budget for the 2024 fiscal year. This absence of Congressional appropriations has also put the agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) missions in jeopardy. The layoffs will affect 530 staff employees, which accounts for about 8% of the lab’s workforce, as well as 40 contractors. Earlier this month, the lab had already experienced a series of contractor cuts. In response to the lack of funding approval prior to the Tuesday layoffs, the JPL took measures such as anticipating a 63% decrease from its FY2023 budget, as directed by NASA, and implementing a hiring freeze, reducing Mars mission contracts, and cutting internal “burden budgets.”
JPL Director Laurie Leshin expressed regret over the situation in a memo to staff, stating, “Unfortunately, those actions alone are not enough for us to make it through the remainder of the fiscal year. So in the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait. To adjust to the much lower MSR budget levels in NASA’s direction to us, we must reduce our workforce in both technical and support areas of the Lab, and across different organizations …. Given the challenge and scale of this workforce action, our approach has prioritized minimizing stress by notifying everyone quickly whether they are impacted or not.”
The layoffs are scheduled for Wednesday, which is a mandatory remote-work day. According to the memo, employees will receive an email notifying them whether they have been laid off after a company-wide virtual workforce update meeting. Leshin advised the employees who are laid off to “forward this email to their personal email account immediately, as NASA requires that access to JPL systems be shut off very shortly following the notification.”
