[HN Gopher] 4000 gone: Inside NASA's brain drain
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       4000 gone: Inside NASA's brain drain
        
       Author : awnird
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2025-10-16 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.planetary.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.planetary.org)
        
       | jfengel wrote:
       | What kills me is that it's not even saving that much money.
       | 
       | The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up
       | to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means
       | that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or
       | about .046% of the deficit.
       | 
       | (That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)
       | 
       | Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the
       | government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of
       | entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you
       | want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs,
       | not just the individuals who manage them.
       | 
       | The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the
       | agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire
       | everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave
       | $21 billion in NASA's budget.
       | 
       | Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our
       | $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.
       | 
       | It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled
       | government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But
       | it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even
       | pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige,
       | and getting basically nothing in return.
        
         | lawlessone wrote:
         | "Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who
         | knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing" -
         | Oscar Wilde
        
         | edmundsauto wrote:
         | Your math makes sense, but it was never about the money.
        
         | fbd_0100 wrote:
         | There's a thriving community of aerospace startups in the US
         | right now that are eager to snatch these NASA folks up. It
         | won't be the right move for all of them, and it's unfortunate
         | to get displaced from a comfortable, prestigious job like that,
         | but I strongly believe a lot of these people will go on to do
         | great things in industry, and potentially have a far greater
         | impact on aerospace than they ever could at NASA.
         | 
         | Not saying I agree with the cuts, just pointing out there may
         | be a silver lining.
        
       | metalman wrote:
       | gone yes, but where?, space x, china?
        
         | rangestransform wrote:
         | Anecdotally, I work with a JPL alumni (not current layoff
         | batch) in the autonomous driving industry
        
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