Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports questionable priorities at the federal government’s space agency.
Over the course of 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off nearly 900 workers due to budget cuts at the agency. The cuts, which came amid delays on the Mars Sample Return program, a mission to collect dust and rocks from the red planet, reduced the lab’s headcount by 13 percent and impacted both technical and support staff.
But the jet propulsion laboratory’s chief inclusion officer, Neela Rajendra, survived the cuts. Rajendra, who helped organize a project to recruit women and minorities to the space industry, has argued that “extreme deadline[s]” are an obstacle to “inclusion,” stating on a 2022 podcast that “some people might be left behind” by the “super fast pace.”
The comment came two years before a pair of NASA astronauts were stranded on the International Space Station for nine months due to a faulty propulsion system, raising questions about why the agency had spent millions on DEI when it couldn’t even bring back space rocks from Mars or its own employees from orbit.
The cuts to the laboratory, which creates land rovers and re-entry systems, had not impacted Rajendra’s role. But by early March, it seemed like her number was finally up.NASA had closed its central diversity office and fired 23 employees in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning DEI in the federal government. The jet propulsion lab, meanwhile, had begun to “alter, remove, or reroute” web pages related to DEI, lab director Laurie Leshin told staff in an email. Though the laboratory is administered by the California Institute of Technology, meaning its staff are not civil servants, it is still owned by NASA and funded by the federal government.
But rather than fire Rajendra, the lab created a new role for her—one with many of the same duties as the old one.
