NASA Acting Chief Says DOGE Will Review the Agency’s Spending as Hundreds Take Buyout Offer

NASA’s four Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, satellites at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Fla., on March 2015. NASA via AP

Janet Petro, acting administrator of NASA, said on Feb. 12 that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would probe the space agency’s spending, noting that hundreds of its employees had already accepted the Trump administration’s worker buyout offer.

Petro, who previously served as head of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, made the comments to reporters at a space industry conference in Washington.

“We are going to have DOGE come. They’re going to look—similarly [to] what they’ve done in other agencies—at our payments and what money has gone out,” Petro said.

She said hundreds of the agency’s employees have accepted the deferred retirement offer, which gives them eight months of pay and benefits if they voluntarily leave their posts.

As of Feb. 13, roughly 75,000 federal workers had accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer, a senior administration official told The Epoch Times.

DOGE has moved rapidly since President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, scouring data and IT systems at multiple federal agencies.

On Feb. 12, the White House released five examples of federal contracts DOGE staffers had terminated.

Hours later, Trump said that he would hold a “news conference” on Feb. 13 to discuss additional findings of “tremendous fraud.”

Many Democrats have expressed concerns.

They accuse the Trump administration of giving DOGE leader Elon Musk, named a “special government employee,” unfettered access to government systems and the authority to cancel contracts, fire workers, or fold entire agencies.

Musk’s role as owner and CEO of SpaceX is problematic for many Democrats, particularly if DOGE probes NASA as Petro indicated.

SpaceX has roughly $15 billion in contracts with NASA, including the company’s work sending astronauts to and from the International Space Station and the upcoming Artemis program, where SpaceX is planning to send humans back to the moon in its Starship spacecraft.

Trump has vowed to only allow Musk to do work at the White House’s discretion, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Feb. 12 emphasized that those five contracts were an example of the administration’s “transparency” with DOGE’s efforts.

While speaking with reporters, Petro was asked if Musk leading DOGE presents a conflict of interest with NASA.

“We have very strict conflict of interest policies,” she said, noting that NASA’s legal office would screen any DOGE staffers for potential conflicts.

A small group of administration officials has begun reviewing NASA’s science and space programs, which constitute its roughly $24 billion yearly budget, and Petro has been busy carrying out many of Trump’s executive orders aimed at terminating government diversity programs.

“All the officials in charge are really trying to wrap our heads around all the executive orders as they’re flying at us,” Petro said.

The future of NASA’s Artemis program is uncertain as both Musk and Trump make lofty goals of sending humans to Mars. The agency has already stated that the initial moon launches would help astronauts “learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare human missions to Mars.”

However, DOGE may consider NASA’s overbudget moon rocket, the Space Launch System, as one potential cost-cutting target, particularly if SpaceX or its competitor Blue Origin succeed in their moon launches.

Mark Tapscott and Reuters contributed to this report.