By March of this year, the Trump administration is hoping to shutter over a dozen buildings and more than 100 labs at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC) in Maryland, the space agency’s first and oldest space center and a keystone for space research since around the time NASA was established in the late 1950s.
As part of its plans to gut the center, it shut NASA’s largest library at the GFSC last month, threatening to trash important documents in the process.
The news was met with outrage by NASA insiders, who pointed out that many of these historical documents remain undigitized, a scandal that has metastasized into the first major PR challenge for recently sworn-in NASA administrator and billionaire space tourist Jared Isaacman.
While agency officials have maintained that the move was part of a 2022 master plan — a “consolidation, not a closure” per NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens — and that researchers would continue to have access to the library’s archives as NASA teams conduct a 60-day review of all materials, GFSC staffers were taken aback at the abrupt and careless nature of the Trump administration’s actions.
“I feel like crying,” planetary scientist David Williams, who has curated space mission data for NASA’s archives, told NPR this week. “I mean, it’s horrible. I’m so frustrated. I’m so mad, and I’m just so upset.”
According to staffers interviewed by the broadcaster, the closures of buildings at Goddard were “rushed and disorganized, with no clear blueprint to replace important spaces.”
The approach has been reminiscent of the Trump administration’s vindictive approach to slashing agency budgets, as exemplified by Elon Musk’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year.
NASA’s budget, in particular, has become a major target of the administration, with a proposed 2026 fiscal budget potentially cutting the agency’s science directorate budget by more than half, an “extinction-level event,” as characterized by critics. (Congress has since rejected Trump’s proposed cuts outright as NASA’s budget continues to be hotly debated.)
“The way that they’ve gone about it has just been extraordinarily haphazard and chaotic, and really to the point of being cruel to the people who work in these buildings,” Goddard operations research analyst Monica Gorman told NPR.
The library’s closure is only the latest in a string of what appear to be tumultuously implemented consolidation efforts. Gorman recalls “chaotic disruptions” and lab equipment being “treated carelessly.”
The agency has since attempted to pour water on the flames, with Isaacman accusing the New York Times of sensationalizing its reporting and mischaracterizing NASA’s plans to throw out undesirable documents currently being stored at the GSFC library.
“The [NYT] story does not fully reflect the context NASA shared,” he tweeted on January 2. “At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines.”
But NASA veterans and advisors say the Trump administration’s approach lead lead to important documents being lost.
“Libraries and archives around the world are being ‘consolidated’ out of existence,” spaceflight engineering expert Dennis Wingo, who has advised NASA as a subject matter expert for decades, wrote in a reply to Isaacman. “I can tell you for an absolute fact that many of the people making the determinations on what is historically valuable or not are not qualified to do so.”
Lawmakers are equally taken aback by the gutting of the GSFC.
“NASA Goddard really is the crown jewel of the NASA facilities when it comes to space science,” senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MA) told NPR. “This administration is essentially doing things without letting the team at NASA Goddard know what their intentions are.”
More on the situation: NASA Veterans Disgusted by Plans to Shut Down Its Largest Library
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