The space science community has long prided itself on its ability to inspire and move people of all backgrounds, but President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders demanding the end of diversity programs have thrown that optimism into chaos.
In response, NASA has suspended funding for diversity and outreach programs, paused the meetings of community groups that interface with space scientists, and banned the activities of internal employee resource groups for women, queer people, and others.
The White House additionally moved to terminate thousands of probationary NASA employees before suddenly reversing the decision at the last minute, though the threat of deep layoffs and budget cuts of up to 50 percent continues to hang over the heads of agency workers. NASA has also closed three of its offices this week, including the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) branch of its equal opportunity office, and laid off its workers.
Those who remain at NASA are hiding symbols of LGBTQIA pride and removing pronouns from their email signatures. Talented scientists who receive federal funding are in fear not only for their jobs but also for their children’s futures, with many looking for work outside the federal funding structure or even considering leaving the US altogether.
“Executive orders are not optional,” said Charles Webb, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division, at a conference on Monday, describing NASA as “racing to comply” with the orders.
These changes demanded by the Trump administration are rolling back decades of evidence-supported work in diversity and outreach. Experts warn that these actions will impede scientific discovery; create a smaller, less creative, and more generic agency; and could even lead to more accidents and loss of life as people working on space missions don’t feel that they can speak out about problems that they see.
Taking an axe to diversity programs isn’t making NASA a more efficient agency — it’s undermining the values of science.
Those working within NASA are bound by the government’s whims, but the chilling impact of these changes is being felt far beyond civil service.
The legality of Trump’s executive orders is up for debate, leaving individual federal grant recipients grappling with how to handle them. The Verge spoke to nine people working in space science (others declined to speak to the media out of concern for their positions), several of whom described receiving conflicting emails from their university employers on what work is or is not allowed, and on what initiatives are being supported, with guidance changing daily. A general atmosphere of fear and worry is leading many to keep their heads down in hopes that their research may remain unaffected.
Taking an axe to diversity programs isn’t making NASA a more efficient agency — it’s undermining the values of science.
Scientists typically look to professional groups for guidance, though most have failed to step up to the plate. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has been widely seen as mishandling its response to the crisis by preemptively deleting content from its website related to diversity and then restoring it after criticism. Other groups like the Space Science Institute (SSI) have also removed pages about a commitment to diversity from its website. Even NASA itself briefly removed mentions of inclusion as one of its core values before reinstating them.
“The removal of a statement (which is just words on a page) does not diminish the commitment of individual researchers and educators in the organization to the idea that diversity in the space science workforce is crucial, and that educational access for all Americans regardless of gender, creed, national origin or other identity breeds innovation and progress in the next generation of scientists,” the SSI said in a statement to The Verge, citing the executive orders as necessitating the change.
With NASA under threat of deep cuts, universities in damage control mode, and most professional organizations floundering, scientists are having to look outside their typical organizational structures to resist Trump’s executive meddling.
“We’ve not seen the kind of leadership that I think we need, and that tells me that the way to push back on this is largely going to be kind of grassroots. It won’t be coming from the top down. It’ll have to come from the bottom up,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University.
No basis in scientific evidence
A theme that experts repeatedly drew attention to was that the promotion of diversity in the sciences was not a matter of window dressing or checkboxes, but an important pillar of critical thought. While they supported wider access to science for ethical and human reasons, they also emphasized that, in purely pragmatic terms, greater diversity among scientists leads to better science.
Trump’s crusade against diversity in sciences “has no basis in scientific evidence,” according to Julie Rathbun, who works in Cornell University’s astronomy department and has worked as a leader in DEIA programs in the past.
“Scientific evidence for years has said diverse groups do better science,” she says. “Social science tells us diverse and inclusive groups do better science and better technology, and have better outcomes.”
NASA previously embraced diversity because it was following the evidence, Rathbun says, and it adopted policies that enabled a range of voices in the room to question and challenge each other. That attitude has been largely embraced by space scientists of all backgrounds, who see the practical and ethical values in diversity.
“We’ve not seen the kind of leadership that I think we need, and that tells me that the way to push back on this is largely going to be kind of grassroots.“
The 1986 Challenger disaster — in which seven crew members were killed when their Space Shuttle broke apart shortly after launch — was directly linked to a homogeneity of thought among NASA personnel. The agency’s lack of diverse perspectives fed into the tendency toward groupthink that contributed to the disaster, while research has shown that more cultural and ethnic diversity in groups leads to more creative and higher quality ideas — and lower risks for space missions.
Diversity initiatives are necessary if the field is to accurately represent the US population, supporters say, noting that they have been making progress toward that goal.
In planetary science, for example, a 2011 demographic survey found that only 25 percent of US researchers were women and just 1 percent were Black or Latinx. There were slight improvements made in the following years, with an increase in a 2020 survey to 35 percent women and 4 percent Latinx researchers, though Black researchers remained distinctly underrepresented with no improvements made in their numbers. The stark lack of Black voices in the field is exactly the kind of issue that DEIA programs hoped to address through outreach and support.
“DEIA is not just lip service. It’s actually trying to make a level playing field,” Byrne says. “And there is a very kind of cold statistical argument behind DEIA that transcends just the moral, which is that we know statistically and scientifically that the more varied a set of perspectives we have, the better the outcome.”
This view was echoed by Mark Sykes, CEO of the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), one of the few leaders of a professional group who did send an unambiguous statement of support for diversity. The role of imagination is key for scientific advances, he says, and a more varied group of people can imagine a broader range of possibilities.
“It’s not rocket science,” Sykes says. “A lot of times, it’s just being considerate of everybody.”
This recent slash-and-burn approach by the Trump administration is striking because, traditionally, space science has been beloved on both the left and right. Conservatives have generally been pro-NASA spending, seeing it as a way to burnish the US’ image and to make it a leader in space development as a source of national pride.
That right-wing support for NASA has extended to support for its diversity initiatives, too. Inclusion was added as a core NASA value by then-administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Republican and first-term Trump appointee. Much of the Artemis program’s promotion under Bridenstine’s tenure revolved around the desire to put the first woman and person of color on the moon. Bridenstine also issued a policy statement affirming commitment to equal opportunities within NASA and its partner institutions. That policy statement has now been deleted.
NASA’s interest in diversity is neither new nor a purely left-wing phenomenon. Threatening to gut the agency’s staff and cudgeling its outreach programs is not a return to a traditional conservative approach but rather veering into a crudely “anti-woke” ethos that has no interest in evidence, reality, or history.
In such circumstances, space scientists are finding their own ways to band together and resist. Sykes says he is committed to promoting diversity as a key value of the PSI. If that means federal funding dries up then they will look for other sources of money, perhaps even crowdfunding. He sees outreach and providing input on DEIA topics to be crucial work that they will keep doing, saying, “If NASA wants, or the government wants to go after us for doing that, then, well, the hell with them.”
For Rathbun, who was active in programs like NASA’s now-suspended Here to Observe initiative that provided outreach for underrepresented students, she says she and her fellow scientists will be continuing their mentoring and support of these students, even if the official program is closed, and inviting them to meetings and workshops to let them know that there are still avenues open to them.
Scientists are even taking it upon themselves to support their colleagues through mutual aid funding. The largely early career researchers who make up the Choir Collaboration, a group dedicated to studying galaxy evolution and promoting intersectionality in science, have started a mutual aid initiative and are collecting financial donations to be distributed to space scientists who have been affected by the cuts, especially those working in DEIA.
For those who are working to diversify science, these efforts are a fundamental duty that scientists have to the broader community. “We view caring and enabling and fostering and uplifting DEIA initiatives, equity, diversity in science, as well as the people who are doing the science, as a part of our job description,” says Choir member Erini Lambrides of NASA Goddard.
NASA’s interest in diversity is neither new nor a purely left-wing phenomenon.
Financial pressures are a real concern for early career scientists, for whom a missed paycheck can be an enormous hardship. They described embarking on postdoc positions and having just a few hundred dollars in the bank, or hearing from colleagues who were told with less than a week’s notice that they might not be getting paid that month. No one becomes a space scientist for the money, but neither scientists can’t be expected to do good work when they can’t afford to pay their rent.
That’s particularly true of those who come from marginalized backgrounds or who work in DEIA initiatives, which are often unfunded and are frequently considered by employers as not as worthwhile work for a scientist as, say, producing a highly cited paper.
That devaluing of outreach work by prospective employers overlooks the human aspect that powers all of science. “Science is never done in isolation, right?” says Choir member Taylor Hutchison, also of NASA Goddard. “We’re people first. And we’re part of communities.”
That sense of community has also powered the mutual aid initiative, which has been taken up and supported by scientists at all career stages. It has spread even beyond the US, reflecting the global nature of the field and an increasing push against astronomy’s imperialist roots and its centering of the Global North.
“The response has been fantastic,” said choir member Gourav Khullar of the University of Washington. “And we’re engaging with the broader astronomy community even outside North America, which is very representative of what the astronomy field is.”
Researchers working outside of federal agencies expressed sympathy for those working within NASA. Federal workers have little freedom to challenge executive orders or to stand up to the government, even in self defense.
“Government employees are not the enemy,” Rathbun said. “They do really good work, especially people at NASA.”
There is a sense that workers at NASA and other federal agencies are being thrown under the bus in the name of a culture war, with their work being denigrated in a way that they don’t have the ability to refute.
“Every time you talk to someone who actually works with career civil servants, you realize that overwhelmingly, they’re super motivated, well-meaning, passionate people,” said Byrne. “These are not bad people. There’s no deep state. These are people who care about their country and the planet and their species, and want to help.”
“Government employees are not the enemy.”
While few would argue that there are some areas in which NASA could curtail its spending and reduce costs, such as the ever-ballooning pork barrel buffet that is the agency’s Space Launch System rocket, the nixing of DEIA values is neither efficient nor supported by the evidence.
It’s the partisan nature of these orders that have people worried, as they undermine the structures that are especially necessary at the cutting edge of scientific thought.
“Many of us work in fields where we’re trying to challenge and break existing paradigms within our science,” Lambrides says. “And in order to really test and break those paradigms, you do need diversity of thought. You do need people coming from different frameworks of life, and how they solve and how they think about problems. Because these are brand new problems we’re working on.”
This isn’t the first time that scientists have seen their work disregarded, and researchers see a clear through-line in right wing attacks on scientific principles.
“If you look at these executive orders in total, it’s an attack on science as a whole,” Rathbun says. “An attack on DEIA is the same as an attack on vaccines, the same as an attack on climate change. It’s an attack on the process. It’s not letting us fulfill that scientific goal of getting our best understanding of the universe.”
