NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has announced a second round of layoffs for 2024, this time laying off 325 people – about 5% of its workforce. The announcement was made on Nov. 12 in a memo sent to employees, which notes the layoffs could have been even larger. The last cut was made this past February, when 530 employees were let go. Part of the issues which forced the layoffs comes from the the possible cancelation of the Mars Sample Return mission. With the October 2024 launch of Europa Clipper, JPL doesn’t have a flagship mission in the pipeline right now.
As with the layoffs in February, the cuts have nothing to do with the individual performance; it’s all budget-related and an attempt to balance the books. NASA Headquarters passed on funding constraints in the current budget to JPL, and while JPL has tried to manage them, the results are the two rounds of difficult layoffs.
“This is a message I had hoped not to have to write,” JPL Director Laurie Leshin said in the memo sent to all staff members. “Despite this being incredibly difficult for our community, this number [of layoffs] is lower than projected a few months ago thanks in part to the hard work of so many people across JPL.”
Dr. Laurie Leshin has been the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since May 2022. Credit: JPL.
Leshin said the lab’s leadership has had to deal with “continued funding challenges” and an uncertain future as NASA has been juggling and reconsidering its priorities for deep space exploration. She noted that the reduction was spread across nearly all areas of JPL, including technical, project, business, and support areas to meet the available funding for Fiscal Year 2025. Leshin said that the outcome of the presidential election last week did not have any bearing on the layoffs.
“We have taken seriously the need to re-size our workforce, whether direct-funded (project) or funded on overhead (burden). With lower budgets and based on the forecasted work ahead, we had to tighten our belts across the board, and you will see that reflected in the layoff impacts,” Leshin wrote.
All employees were told to work from home today (Nov. 13) and everyone would receive an email whether their position was being eliminated or not. Leshin said JPL would offer “personalized support to our laid-off colleagues who are part of the workforce reduction, including offering dedicated time to discuss their benefits, and several other forms of assistance.”
Artist’s concept of a Europa Clipper mission. Credit: NASA/JPL
This second round of layoffs were not a surprise. During a recent town hall with employees, Leshin discussed the continued funding challenges and projections of what the potential impact on the JPL workforce could look like. She indicated her team had been working through multiple workforce scenarios to address the changes in funding, with the goal of minimizing adverse effects on JPL’s capabilities and workers. But despite their efforts, the conclusion was that this additional workforce reduction was inevitable.
After the layoffs today, JPL will be left with about 5,500 regular employees.
“These are painful but necessary adjustments that will enable us to adhere to our budget while continuing our important work for NASA and our nation,” JPL said in a statement.
On social media, JPL employees called the news “devastating,” and “awful.” Another said, “Can’t imagine the stress this will produce.”
But Leshin also said she believed this would be the last workforce reduction needed for the foreseeable future and that staffing levels at this point are now “stable and supportable.”
“While we can never be 100 percent certain of the future budget, we will be well positioned for the work ahead,” Leshin wrote. “This may not help much in this difficult moment, but I do want to be crystal clear with my thoughts and perspective. If we hold strong together, we will come through this, just as we have done during other turbulent times in JPL’s nearly 90-year history.”
The “Dare Mighty Things” sign at JPL. Image by Nancy Atkinson.
JPL has a long and storied history — “Dare Mighty Things” is the Lab’s motto — with the Lab’s origins dating back to the 1930s, when Caltech professor Theodore von Kármán oversaw pioneering work in rocket propulsion. In the 1960s, JPL began to develop robotic spacecraft to explore other worlds, beginning with the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon, quickly followed by Mariner missions to Mercury, Venus and Mars. Now, missions and instruments built or managed by JPL have visited every planet in our Solar System as well as studying the Sun. The iconic Voyager missions have now entered interstellar space.
Despite the difficult layoffs, Leshin was hopeful for what’s to come for JPL.
“We are an incredibly strong organization—our dazzling history, current achievements, and relentless commitment to exploration and discovery position us well for the future,” she wrote.