Jet Propulsion Laboratory To Undergo Mass Layoffs

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.”