NASA is converting 7,500 contract jobs into civil service posts this year, an effort by Administrator Jared Isaacman to rebuild technical expertise inside the agency that has unsettled the contractors who long filled those roles.
The change, part of what Mr. Isaacman calls his “workforce initiative,” reverses decades of outsourcing at the space agency, [as Eric Berger of Ars Technica reported](<https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/why-is-nasa-bringing-7500-contractors-back-to-work-as-civil-servants/>). Before it began, NASA employed about 40,000 contractors against roughly 14,000 civil servants. The civil service total had fallen by about 4,000 since early 2025, when thousands of employees left through deferred resignation and other programs run by the Department of Government Efficiency. It now stands near 21,000, larger than before the second Trump administration began, a growth Mr. Isaacman achieved while the White House pressed other agencies to shrink.
Gerry Griffin, a flight director during the Apollo missions who later ran Johnson Space Center in Houston, supports the shift. His “Gold Team” in Mission Control handled the 1969 launch of Apollo 12, when the ascending Saturn V rocket triggered lightning that disrupted the spacecraft’s electrical systems, and flight controllers and the astronaut Alan Bean scrambled to reset them. “When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry,” he said in an interview. “With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference.”
In the Apollo years, Mr. Griffin said, contractors supplemented NASA’s staff, but the Mission Control jobs stayed inside the agency, which bore responsibility for success or failure. “Midway through the space shuttle era, I was surprised to find that a lot of the jobs in Mission Control had gone to contractors,” he said. “I applaud Jared’s idea to get back to that kind of in-house capability and responsibility.”
Mr. Isaacman has said the conversions will save money and restore what he calls “core competencies.” In staff memos, he said early pilots had identified more than $100 million in savings, a figure he said could grow past $1 billion. “There are, of course, cost savings from this effort,” he 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 firms most affected, Amentum, Jacobs Engineering Group and KBR, each supplied a few thousand workers for engineering and other services at NASA’s field centers. They dispute the math, saying the overhead they charge runs only about 2 or 3 percent of an employee’s compensation, and argue that abandoning a workforce model that has served NASA for decades adds uncertainty just as the agency prepares to return astronauts to the Moon and build a base there.
Others have objected more quietly. Half a dozen contractors-turned-civil-servants, industry leaders and senior NASA officials described a rollout they called hasty and disruptive, though because the initiative is largely a fait accompli, almost none would speak on the record. “I thought we were draining the swamp, not growing the number of civil servants,” one industry source said.
Industry officials also warn of lost flexibility. Under the old arrangement, NASA could simply decline to renew a contract when it changed course; civil servants carry far more job protections. The contractor ecosystem also lobbies for NASA’s budget in Congress, and some in industry believe funding fights will get harder without it. “NASA over the last 50 years has built an incredible ecosystem that is specialized to serve NASA and other federal agencies,” an industry source said. “The system allows for flexibility and innovation by the companies. Now, that’s going to go away.”
For the workers, the conversion has meant upheaval. NASA’s 10 field center directors were told to identify contract employees, especially those tied to launch, operations and mission-critical engineering, to bring on board. Most have kept their locations, but they must leave their contract firms outright, and pay and benefits differ. Many prefer the civil service. Others, uneasy about becoming government employees under President Trump, did not want the switch.
Mr. Isaacman’s team points to the firing room at Kennedy Space Center during work on the Artemis II launch. When a problem arose with the rocket’s ground systems on the pad, NASA controllers had no direct access to the schematics, which were bound up by contractor intellectual-property rules. The information arrived by screen-share over a Microsoft Teams call. “You would be sitting there with some tool that’s livestreaming someone else’s display, trying to see a schematic,” one engineer on the team said. “How effing absurd is that?”
Critics have argued the disruption could impair NASA’s return to the Moon, delay Artemis III or raise safety risks. But at a meeting at the end of August, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, the independent body expressly charged with identifying safety risks at the agency, praised the effort.