Not long before he decided to leave NASA, Steve Rader, an engineer who spent 36 years at the Johnson Space Center, held a retreat for leaders in his department at his home in downtown Houston. It had been a trying few months for Rader and his team. “I will say, I don't cry a lot,” he tells me in a recent phone call. That changed after Trump took office. “You can ask my wife, from the first few months I cried.”
After decades working on projects like the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, Rader had, since 2021, been leading an office on open innovation, tasked with bringing outside ideas and talent into NASA. But in the early days of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Affairs (DOGE), the atmosphere inside the agency was heavy with sadness and paranoia. Everyone was thinking of leaving, afraid they were going to be fired, or both. “It was crazy,” Rader says. “Every day, some new person would be like, ‘Oh, just message me on Signal.’ It became the de facto way people talked.”
By the time Rader met with his leaders last winter, an email had already gone out offering more than 2 million federal employees, including those at NASA, the option to resign while still getting paid through September. Rumors were swirling that the president was planning to impose huge cuts to NASA spending. At the same time, no one was really talking at work about their own plans. “I think leaders especially didn't want to influence other people into leaving,” Rader said.
That’s what made what happened next so shocking. There were 10 people at Rader’s apartment. They were, in his description, “the hardcore NASA people”—the kind of ultra-qualified, hyper-driven leaders who could work anywhere, for just about any salary, but still chose the federal government. Right at the start of the meeting, half of them announced they were leaving. Some of them, like Rader, were near retirement. Others were much younger, members of what should have been the next generation of NASA leadership. “One of them, her and her family are moving to Costa Rica,” Rader says. “That's how scared she is of what's going on.”
As the winter bore on, more and more top officials walked out the door. “A lot of them tried to hang on for a long time, but most of them are gone,” Rader said. Eventually, Rader himself decided to pull the plug. He retired from NASA in February. He’d already been thinking about stepping away sometime in the next couple of years. But the changes at Trump’s new NASA accelerated his timeline. “I've gotten to know people all around the agency throughout the years,” he says. “And I just started hearing these reports, and it was like, I don't want to be a part of this.”
This isn’t politics, Rader says, not for him, not for the vast majority of his colleagues. If you work at NASA long enough, you get used to swings of ideology and priorities as different administrations come and go. This is something bigger, something unprecedented. “It was NASA's being deconstructed,” Rader says. The American space agency—the one that put humans on the moon, that landed robots on Mars, that sent a probe past Jupiter into the Kuiper Belt and beyond—was being taken apart.