It would appear that the latest wave of U.S. federal program cuts fueled by the Trump administration has affected NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) lab in New York City, a branch of the agency dedicated to studying climate change and other Earth sciences.
On Friday (April 25), news outlets such as CNN and SpaceNews reported that GISS’s lease on office space in a Columbia University building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side is set to be canceled. According to SpaceNews, an April 24 email sent to Goddard employees and signed by Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (the parent organization of GISS), stated that the lease will end on May 31. The news outlet says the lease, which costs the agency $3.03 million annually, was originally supposed to last through August 2031.
However, GISS Director Gavin Schmidt assured CNN that “the work continues, the data, the products, the science will continue because science is done by people, not by buildings.” As of now, NASA says employees will be placed on “temporary remote work agreements while NASA seeks and evaluates options for a new space for the GISS team.”
Lystrup reportedly says the termination is related to “ongoing reviews by the current administration of all government leases,” SpaceNews said of the obtained email’s contents, but it remains unclear whether the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) spearheaded the matter. It is worth considering what role DOGE had to play in the decision because the department, led by SpaceX billionaire founder Elon Musk, is behind several other changes happening at NASA.
For instance, DOGE staffers have recently been given significant access to agency systems and documents without clear disclosure of their workflow— to the dismay of some politicians because of possible threats to national security and conflicts of interest (due to SpaceX’s role as a frequent provider of launch services for NASA).
News of GISS’s lease cancellation also comes amid several other changes that DOGE, in conjunction with the Trump administration, has provoked, such as the cutting of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs as well as the sudden layoffs of thousands of federal workers in the name of saving what the department considers “wasted taxpayer money.”
Reports have also been circulating about budget “passback documents” that suggest the White House plans to cut NASA’s science budget by about 50%, which could lead to huge consequences like the closing of Goddard Space Flight Center and the gutting of in-development missions like the highly anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
It is also of note that GISS’s lease in particular was canceled. Not only does it deal with Earth science projects that fall under the umbrella of NASA science programs that are possibly in danger, but it is also focused on climate change research, which the Trump administration seems to be specifically targeting.
Over 800 workers at the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) were terminated abruptly in March, for instance, and the White House’s general decision-making as of late appears to align with a policy blueprint laid out by a conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation describes NOAA as being part of the “climate change alarm industry” and calls for it to be dismantled and its weather forecasting operations fully commercialized.
