This is a massive shift in how NASA does business, and it’s not without controversy. But Griffin said he welcomes the change and believes it will be better for the agency in the long run. “I applaud Jared’s idea to get back to that kind of in-house capability and responsibility,” he said.
Not without controversy
Not everyone is a fan of Isaacman’s workforce initiative, which they believe has been rolled out too hastily and has been disruptive at the space agency. But because it is largely a fait accompli, almost no one has wanted to speak on record opposing it.
For this article, Ars spoke to half a dozen people on background, including contractors who are now civil servants, industry leaders, and senior NASA officials to understand their concerns about Isaacman’s initiative.
The largest and most directly affected contractors are Amentum, Jacobs Engineering Group, and KBR. Each firm provided a few thousand contractors to NASA for engineering and other services at field centers across the country. These companies say that radically departing from a workforce model that has allowed NASA to be successful for decades introduces uncertainty at a time when the agency is embarking on its most ambitious mission in decades, returning to the Moon and building a base there.
Isaacman has said NASA will benefit not only from rebuilding NASA’s technical workforce but also from saving money. In staff memos, Isaacman has said that early pilots of the workforce initiative had already identified more than $100 million in savings from making employees civil servants and that over time, this could grow to more than $1 billion.
“There are, of course, cost savings from this effort,” Isaacman wrote in May. “There are also operational benefits, as contractor structures often include layered management, third-party tools, contractual barriers, and other inefficiencies that can challenge progress.”
The contracting firms dispute this, saying the overhead they charge is only about 2 or 3 percent of an employee’s compensation.
Prior to this initiative, NASA had about 40,000 contractors and about 14,000 civil servants. The latter number had shrunk by about 4,000 from early 2025, when thousands of employees left through deferred resignation and other programs run by DOGE to slim down the federal workforce.
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