NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab Laid Off 900 Workers Due to Budget Cuts—But Hasn’t Fired Its Top DEI Officer

Over the course of 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off nearly 900 workers due to budget cuts at the agency. The cuts, which came amid delays on the Mars Sample Return program, a mission to collect dust and rocks from the red planet, reduced the lab’s headcount by 13 percent and impacted both technical and support staff.

But the jet propulsion laboratory’s chief inclusion officer, Neela Rajendra, survived the cuts. Rajendra, who helped organize a project to recruit women and minorities to the space industry, has argued that "extreme deadline[s]" are an obstacle to "inclusion," stating on a 2022 podcast that "some people might be left behind" by the "super fast pace."

The comment came two years before a pair of NASA astronauts were stranded on the International Space Station for nine months due to a faulty propulsion system, raising questions about why the agency had spent millions on DEI when it couldn’t even bring back space rocks from Mars or its own employees from orbit.

The cuts to the laboratory, which creates land rovers and re-entry systems, had not impacted Rajendra’s role. But by early March, it seemed like her number was finally up.

NASA had closed its central diversity office and fired 23 employees in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning DEI in the federal government. The jet propulsion lab, meanwhile, had begun to "alter, remove, or reroute" web pages related to DEI, lab director Laurie Leshin told staff in an email. Though the laboratory is administered by the California Institute of Technology, meaning its staff are not civil servants, it is still owned by NASA and funded by the federal government.

But rather than fire Rajendra, the lab created a new role for her—one with many of the same duties as the old one. Instead of chief inclusion officer, the lab explained in a March 10 email, Rajendra would henceforth serve as the "Chief of the Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success." Ostensibly set up to "maximize our potential," the office would oversee the lab’s "affinity groups"— including "B.E.S.T," the Black Excellence Strategic Team—as well as "wellness" and "accessibility."

"I believe this change is essential for JPL’s future success and aligns well with Neela’s strengths and focus over the past year," Leshin, the lab director, wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. She added that a "small number" of human resources officers would be reassigned to the new office.

The title change provides one of the most clear cut examples yet of how institutions are seeking to circumvent Trump’s ban on DEI by renaming diversity offices and shuffling staff. At the University of Michigan School of Nursing, for example, the school’s diversity office was renamed "the office of community culture," while at PBS, the network attempted to move two diversity officials to other departments so that they wouldn’t be fired.

Rajendra’s new role comes as NASA is under scrutiny for the sort of the diversity programs she helped organize, such as an industry pledge, "Space Workforce 2030," to hire more women and minorities. She also ensured that the leaders of affinity groups were paid for their DEI work, according to a 2023 article in Physics World, and spoke of the "world reckoning" that followed the death of George Floyd.

It led to "awareness and willingness and commitment to change from the perspective of diversity, equity and inclusion," she told the magazine.

A spokeswoman for the laboratory, Veronica McGregor, said that Rajendra’s new role would focus solely on "retaining our highly skilled workforce" in the wake of the budget cuts. But for more than two weeks after the title change, Rajendra’s bio on a NASA website continued to reference "diversity, equity, and inclusion." The language was only scrubbed on March 27, the day after the Free Beacon asked the laboratory for comment.

The lab "launched the Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success to strengthen its potential, better leverage its extraordinary talent and cultivate an industry-leading workplace," McGregor wrote in an email. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she said, "continues to be committed to following all rules, laws, and regulations."

The lab’s emphasis on diversity appears to have come from the top. Leshin, the laboratory’s director, wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post that the lab had "made a commitment to increase the number of women in senior technical leadership roles, and to hire and retain more Black engineers."

Those commitments were justified on the grounds that DEI improves employee retention. In a 2022 presentation on "DEIA in the NASA Family," Rajendra suggested that the "failure to promote DEI" at SpaceX—"a fast paced, high innovation company"—was one reason why it had a higher attrition rate than Boeing, a "traditional corporate entity."

In June 2024, two astronauts were stranded when the thrusters malfunctioned on a Boeing spaceship. They were only rescued nine months later, when a SpaceX capsule brought them back.

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