The Brief

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday announced that it would lay off approximately 530 employees, or about 8% of its workforce, in response to a reduced budget from NASA and lack of a new spending plan from Congress for the new fiscal year.

In a memo published on JPL’s website, Director Laurie Leshin said the workforce reduction would also affect 40 contractors.

"After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs," Leshin wrote.

The cuts will extend across JPL and include technical and support areas. Affected employees will learn their fate on Wednesday, according to the memo.

“These cuts are among the most challenging that we have had to make even as we have sought to reduce our spending in recent months,” Leshin wrote.

As of Tuesday night, it was unclear which missions will be the most affected.

Back in the fall, officials announced there’d be budget cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, the goal of which is to identify whether life has ever existed on Mars by studying bits and pieces of the red planet. So far 23 samples have been collected.

The rover Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021, and has since been using a special drill to gather and pack away samples from the Jezero crater into specially sealed tubes.

The hope is that those samples will then be picked up at a later date and sent back to Earth by 2033 so that they can be studied. The cuts could jeopardize the timeline of the mission.

Congressional representatives from California have been pushing to have the budget cuts to the program reversed.

After the layoffs were announced, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla said in a statement, "Make no mistake: these crushing job cuts are the direct result of the Administration’s premature decision to bypass Congressional spending authority and unilaterally slash vital funding for JPL’s Mars Sample Return mission. These dramatic cuts are devastating for our local workforce and will set California and America’s scientific and space leadership back significantly at this critical moment.

In a previous statement, Padilla had warned that if Congressional spending wasn't securing, "JPL will not be able to meet the next launch window and will force a dramatic reduction of billions of dollars in contracts as well as the termination of hundreds of highly skilled employees.”

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration must continue providing gender-affirming care to transgender inmates in federal prisons.

The decision, in an emergency appeal, maintains a lower court's injunction on a federal Bureau of Prisons' policy that would terminate hormone therapy and other treatments for trans inmates.

The order offered no explanation behind the decision. It simply read, "The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied."

It also said Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would side with the Trump administration and would grant the application for stay.

A federal district judge barred the BOP from implementing its policy this summer.

A second court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, also rejected the administration's request to pause U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth's order.

That's when U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

As the federal judge's injunction remains in place, the legal battle over the policy continues.

Li Nowlin-Sohl, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer involved in this case, said the organization believes there are more than 2,000 people in BOP custody who identify as transgender. (The BOP stopped publishing data reflecting transgender inmates after Trump took office in 2025. It only records male or female individuals incarcerated in the federal system.)

Kingdom v. Trump represents 1,000 inmates who have a gender dysphoria diagnosis, Nowlin-Sohl explained. Of those, the ACLU believes there are about 800 who have been prescribed hormone therapy and many who are also receiving social transition accommodations, Nowlin-Sohl said.

In its request for an emergency stay on the earlier rulings, the Trump administration argued that providing this care poses several risks, including for recipients of this specialized care, who it argued would become "targets for attacks." They also said that it raises "fairness concerns" as it would "breed resentment" with other inmates.

Access to gender-affirming care is considered medically necessary to treat gender dysphoria, a medical term used to describe the deep discomfort caused by a mismatch between a person's assigned sex at birth and their gender identity. Without it, individuals can struggle severely with mental health issues such as heightened anxiety and depression, with some turning to self-harm and suicide.

Gender-affirming care can include "...hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries among others," according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. (In its filings, the Trump administration questioned WPATH's standards of care, which were developed by experts in transgender health and used by organizations across the world.)

Some people who are transgender may require hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries; others may not require any of these interventions.

The BOP has treated people diagnosed with gender dysphoria since at least 1992, the ACLU said in response to the government's filings to the Supreme Court.

"Had BOP's doctors found this treatment unhelpful or harmful to patients or had the agency found that the treatment compromised security, surely BOP would have mentioned it in the administrative record," the ACLU wrote.

This is a "glaring omission" and appears to indicate that the government's arguments now are simply "contrived," the ACLU continued.

NPR previously covered the impact of the loss of hormone treatments on people who are incarcerated. One woman said she experienced severe physical and mental anguish when she lost access to hormone treatments.

The Supreme Court's decision is at odds with other rulings that support the Trump administration's anti-trans policy agenda.

Last June, the court ruled that states can ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools. And in 2025, the court upheld state laws that make it illegal for doctors and other health professionals to provide gender-affirming care for minors.

In one of his first executive orders of his second term, President Trump targeted the trans community with a declaration that his administration recognizes just two sexes, male and female. This order has been the basis for a host of anti-trans policies throughout the administration.

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