During a second round of the program, which closed at midnight Friday, 3,000 employees applied to leave the agency, Warner said, following the 870 employees that applied to leave during the first round.

NASA’s actual workforce is actually roughly 25% civil servants and 75% contractors. The 25% civil servants make up the 18,000 of which 4,000 jobs are lost. The number of contractors losing their jobs is much higher. Many of these folks are people who are career lifers at NASA, but because of many reasons they were not able to be hired as a civil servant.

yikes. i used to dream of working for nasa and even interned there, but ultimately decided not to. glad i dodged this bullet