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.
Your math makes sense, but it was never about the money.
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.
“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing" - Oscar Wilde
That's a great quote!
Generally agree with the sentiment, just they're probably worried about the 2026 proposal, that talked about $18.8 billion for FY 2026. Both the Senate the House did not agree with the White House proposal, yet the threat that $6 billion was going to vanish causes a lot of issues. Now they're in limbo with shutdown. And FY 2025 was a full-year CR. So not a lot of belief in a functioning House / Senate.
Difficult to plan the usual when the White House is proposing -$6B and the House / Senate are not functioning. And they all got emails paraphrased as "get out while you can."
Minor nitpick, the budget amount really seems to depend where you look. Per USASpending.gov, supposedly "the official open data source of federal spending information", FY 2025 Obligated is $9.4 trillion as of August 30th. FY 2024 was $9.7 trillion. FY 2019 was when it was $6.6B. [1]
However, your numbers are closer to the numbers from the Treasury that say $7 trillion was spent so far this year. [2] Treasury actually mentions USASpending by name and notes "Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."
Differences between them:
Social Security looks like way larger percent paid than percent promised. Total dollars on Treasury is $100 billion higher than USAspending. Medicare looks like a lot has been promised, yet to be delivered. National Defense looks quite a bit more promised than delivered. Income Security is also more paid than promised (~another $100 billion) General Government and EETSS was not included in Treasury (?). They're at 99%, no room for another 6%.Social Security 23% 16.30% Medicare 14% 18.30% Health 14% 11.60% Net Interest 14% 12.30% National Defense 13% 15.90% Income Security 10% 6.70% Veterans Benefits and Services 5% 4% Transportation 2% 1.70% Natural Resources and Environment 1% 1.20% Administration of Justice 1% 1% General Government 4.2% Education, Employment, Training 1.9% and Social Services Other 2% 4.90% SUM 99% 100.00%[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...