Copyright Space.com
Activities at NASA's flagship science center are coming under a Congressional magnifying glass, and lawmakers are calling for the space agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to get involved. A letter from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demands that NASA must cease facility closures taking place during the government shutdown at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, and that the agency must immediately halt its consolidation activities there. The letter cites a previous Space.com investigation that revealed NASA has been prematurely and illegally implementing President Trump's 2026 budget request before it has been approved by Congress by dismantling and closing key laboratories and offices at Goddard. Lofgren's letter, sent Nov. 10 to NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy, gives the space agency 24 hours to respond with confirmation that all lab closures and workspace relocations have ceased. "NASA must stop what it is doing at Goddard and submit to oversight by Congress and the OIG before it inflicts permanent damage on agency scientific capabilities with severe and lasting consequences," Lofgren wrote. Leading up to and throughout the government shutdown, Goddard administration announced and began an accelerated implementation of the center's 20-year "Master Plan," which outlines facility renovations, demolitions and constructions designed to gradually upgrade the campus through 2037. Over the past several weeks, as nearly 15,000 NASA employees across the nation remained on furlough due to the latest U.S. government shutdown, select groups at Goddard have been granted temporary "excepted" status with instructions to return to work to pack up their offices and laboratories within a matter of days for relocation, as whole buildings are deadbolted and marked for divestment. Since Space.com's initial report, more labs have been marked abandonment, with as many as 13 major campus facilities marked for closure by March 2026. According to project scientists working on NASA's next generation Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is poised to rival the discoveries of predecessors like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, they were given only four days to empty a mission-critical laboratory. Their window to do so expires Wednesday (Nov. 12). For that lab and others, one Goddard scientist told Space.com, "There's potentially millions of dollars of equipment that is being planned to just be abandoned in place." "This all must end now," Lofgren's letter states. "NASA needs to stop what it is doing at Goddard, explain itself to Congress, and convincingly justify its actions before it can even think about continuing to move forward." In addition to NASA's 24-hour deadline to comply, Lofgren also gave NASA seven days to provide "a full accounting of the damage inflicted on Goddard thus far," and wrote that both the House Science Committee and NASA's Office of Inspector General would be reviewing the findings. Lofgren dismissed justifications from NASA legislative officials and Goddard leadership, who apparently claimed during a Nov. 4 briefing that the moves were "a mere implementation of the Master Plan." She called NASA's failure to disclose the goings-on at Goddard "a grave error." "NASA's briefers failed to mention that an accelerated evacuation of additional facilities would occur within just eight days," Lofgren wrote. "NASA compounded its error by taking advantage of a government shutdown to rapidly accelerate the timeline for the Goddard moves while broadening their scale and breadth to a degree that risks drastically negative consequences for agency scientific capabilities." "I reject the explanation that abruptly and haphazardly uprooting employees and millions (at least) of dollars of equipment without a destination or technical justification could reasonably be considered in alignment with any existing 'plan,'" Lofgren added. The letter also highlights NASA's reasoning that the consolidations align with "agency priorities," writing that those priorities "seek to eviscerate NASA science, gut its workforce, and threaten the United States' leadership in space." Lofgren's intervention marks the first formal House oversight action targeting NASA's internal restructuring at Goddard, and complements a Senate report from September, "The Destruction of NASA's Mission," claiming such moves and other reorganizations happening at the space agency were being illegally implemented to follow President Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal.
