The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut at least 2,145 high-ranking Nasa employees with specialized skills or management responsibilities.
According to documents obtained by Politico, most employees leaving are in senior-level government ranks, depriving the agency of decades of experience as part of a push to slash the size of the federal government through early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.
The documents indicate that 1,818 of the staff currently serve in core mission areas, like science or human space flight, while the others work in mission support roles including information technology, or IT.
Let’s say it’s $250,000 on average for these employees base pay + benefits. That’s about half a billion in savings.
Which is
0.0016%0.016% of the $3Trillion dollars in debt the MAGAs just approved. So this basically saves us nothing and only hurts our ability to invest in technological innovation.What a bunch of dumb fucks.
It’s way, way worse than. When you spend money at NASA you aren’t just setting it on fire, those salaries support everything that the people who work there spend money on in their personal lives. It pays local taxes. It supports the salaries of workers in the local communities (I don’t mean where NASA buildings are either, that money goes to all 50 states). It also mostly gets spent issuing contracts to the fabricators that make the things for NASA. It pays salaries at Northrup, Lockheed, Boeing etc. There are also all the drivers pushing the advancement of industry and education and their knock-on effects that come from leading the world in aerospace science and engineering.
And the real kick in the pants: all of those things together GENERATE TAX REVENUE. Even if, for some insanely immoral and degenerate reason, you wanted to ignore the ways that NASA makes the world a better place–when viewed through a purely fiscal lens the money spent at NASA generates more in tax revenue downstream than it costs to run NASA. When you cut their budget like this you aren’t reducing the debt/deficit, you’re increasing it.
And don’t forget that NASA research has lead directly to, or helped to enhance things like:
And so on…
I still feel like that’s an overestimation. I have worked there in the past, and the best and brightest often are because they’re passionate people. They tend to get undervalued and taken advantage of because of that passion.
MAGA Nazis can’t do math. The truth is what they declare it to be.
Being pedantic about a good point, but I’m pretty sure you have an extra zero in that percentage. 0.016% of 3 trillion is 480 million, 0.0016% is 48 million