NASA’S “ONE GIANT LEAP” TOWARD DEI

The space agency spent heavily on equity, gender affirmation, while contract mishaps and procurement nightmares piled up.

On June 6, 2024, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore arrived at the International Space Station on a Boeing Starliner space craft for an eight-day mission. This was Starliner’s first crewed mission to the ISS. Safety concerns with the Starliner arose during its flight to ISS as the capsule experienced helium leaks and thruster malfunctions.  

Boeing and NASA engineers spent several weeks determining if the issue could be fixed, but Starliner was ultimately not deemed safe enough to carry the astronauts. The capsule returned to earth, unmanned, in September 2024.  

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, was selected to bring the astronauts back again, and the rescue mission is upon us this week.

The scandal has put a spotlight on NASA, so Open the Books decided to take a closer look at its recent activities and spending.

Embedding DEI into every agency, even NASA, was a mission of the Biden Administration, and one which the new Trump Administration has vowed to reverse. We’re investigating the different ways DEI manifested itself at NASA and taking a deep dive into their spending through grants and contracts – especially with Boeing and SpaceX.

With an annual budget of $25 billion, NASA is one of the smaller federal agencies. But its mission is high risk and high visibility, so it’s crucial to understand its decision making and investments.

BEFORE D OR E, THERE WAS I

NASA had embraced DEI ideology over the past several decades, including during the first Trump Administration to some degree; in 2020 then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine added “Inclusion” to the agency’s list of core values, joining safety, integrity, teamwork, and excellence. 

Inclusion added to NASA signage under the first Trump Administration. The current Trump Administration has since removed this extra “core value.” The addition seems redundant given “teamwork,” another core value, already conveys mission cohesion.

To celebrate the addition of “inclusion” as a core value, NASA’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity and the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer hosted Ibram X. Kendi to give a talk titled “Mission to Inclusion: Cultivating an Antiracist Workplace.” Kendi is the author of the controversial books How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

Email records indicate the event was coordinated with Penguin Random House, Kendi’s publisher, and that Kendi was paid for his time. We do not know how much NASA paid for the event, but a similar event with the National Institutes of Health cost $5,000. The NASA event was held in August 2020.

That same summer, email records show NASA employees at Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers coordinated a “Weight of the World” series of “discussions on racism.”

While the inclusion of “inclusion” in NASA’s core values helped fuel the racial struggle sessions at NASA in 2020, there were also attempts by the Trump Administration to curb DEI in the federal agencies that same year. Executive Order 13950 on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, published in September 2020, aimed to stop agencies, contractors, and grantees from performing DEI trainings. This executive order was rescinded by the Biden administration a few months later.

DEI UNDER BIDEN

Biden’s Executive Order 13985 on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, signed on January 20, 2021, was the first of several EOs that sought to embed equity considerations in all government programmatic activities. See the 2021 email to NASA staff detailing the EO here.

Public records requests reveal the kinds of training NASA leadership considered for its employees after Trump’s executive order was rescinded.

Planning emails for the 2023 for Johnson Space Center’s “Diversity Equity Inclusion and Accessibility Day” give a proposed itinerary for an all-day event “minimally spanning core hours of 9:00am—3:00pm.”

One of the businesses under consideration to contract for the event, Decide Diversity, included a “Table of Diversity” for participants to personalize. The chart was in the style of the periodic table of elements seen across the country in science classrooms. The Table of Diversity, according to training documents, would “remind us of the various ways we are diverse, and dives into the experiences we have because of our diversity.” Elements listed in BOLD were meant to represent the “mythical norm” and included traits like “white” and “able-bodied.”

The Table of Diversity from Decide Diversity

Professional development coursework at NASA also featured DEI messaging, like:

• Diversity All In, a three-and-a-half-hour course which “provides a common understanding and language for diversity and inclusion.”

• The Power of Inclusion, a three-hour course on how to “engage men to advance women in leadership positions.”

• The Illusion of Inclusion: Global Inclusion, Unconscious Bias, and the Bottom Line, a book which “offers a road map and an easy to comprehend model on how to minimize the impact of unconscious and conscious biases.”

• Diversity Beyond Lip Service: A Coaching Guide for Challenging Bias, a book advertising that “a deeper level of candor and vulnerability is needed to move the needle towards real progress.” The book explicitly sets out to make “white men” feel “discomfort,” saying in one passage:

“In order to move toward a more inclusive society, the primary beneficiaries of privilege—namely European-American, heterosexual, Christian men—must recognize the advantages they are automatically granted. But the goal in addressing privilege is not to antagonize white men, but to involve them in the process and encourage their accountability, because we will only make progress if all of us—especially those in positions of power—are on board. While white men must recognize their privilege, the rest of us must recognize that for them, this new accountability will come with a sense of loss and discomfort:”

And there were more book talks. In 2021 Johnson Space Center’s parenting affinity group invited Uju Asika to talk about her book Bringing Up Race; How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World to, as an internal email said, “positively open up the lines of communication on anti-racism.”

The book, published in 2020, features passages lamenting the author’s “Eurocentric” education in the U.K., “colonialism,” and the results of the 2016 election. As Asika put it: “As a woman of color in today’s Brexit and Trump climate, you have to stay woke.”

Another passage from the book urges Americans to treat Thanksgiving as an opportunity for activism and social change in the United States:

“Stop whitewashing America’s past. This doesn’t mean you have to cancel Thanksgiving, but your child should understand why a Native American might not want to sit at your feast. Explain that for many, Turkey Day is a day of mourning. It recalls the systematic genocide of indigenous people whose lands were stolen and whose children were taken from them, many of whom were captured and sold as slaves. Maybe you can use Thanksgiving to reflect and commit to creating a society more people can be thankful for.”

The Department of Defense K-12 schools faced criticism for offering a book with a similar passage to its employees.

Johnson Space Center welcomed Asika back for another talk during Diversity Month the following year.

NASA’s DEI STRATEGIC PLAN

In 2022 NASA rolled out its 2022-2026 Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Accessibility,” to align with another Biden executive order, EO 14035 “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.” Major goals of the plan include race and sex-based hiring and promotion initiatives, like:

• Ensure recruitment plans focus on underrepresented individuals and members of underserved communities and individuals with disabilities, utilizing the full potential of Special Emphasis Programs (SEPs) and Human Capital Strategic Planning. [One example of such a project involved NASA’s streaming service, NASA+, creating a documentary series called “The Color of Space,” and then taking the series “on a road tour, providing free in-person screenings at historically Black colleges and universities, conferences, and festivals Nationwide,” according to one budget document.]

• To encourage managers to promote diversity at top levels of NASA leadership, for managers and supervisors, “there should be greater focus on training...in areas such as implicit bias and workforce diversity. Finally, the process of selecting top leaders can be updated to better reflect DEIA principles and practices.”

• Leverage “NASA’s work in digital transformation and data analytics” to “embark on an ambitious program to harness existing data systems, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to analyze DEIA-relevant data.”

NASA’s DEIA Strategic Plan outlines an intensive DEI training regime for staffers in the Science Mission Directorate, which is charged with aligning scientific research across disciplines.

A related NASA Executive Performance Management document indicates that executive performance plans were “updated to include a diversity, equity, and inclusion” element, meaning that staff’s work performance was evaluated on how closely the staffers conformed to DEI ideology. Examples of actions and behavior that promote DEI included:

• Practice allyship, emphasize social justice and inclusion, and strive to advance the interests of underrepresented or marginalized groups.

• Allow open space for honest conversations and diversity dialogues.

• Advocate for and participate in DEI&A training, learning sessions, activities, and seminars to enhance cultural competency; encourage the sharing of takeaways from training courses. Incorporate newly learned DEI&A information/lessons into the leadership of your team on a day-to-day basis.

• Promote the development and advancement of underrepresented groups through nominating and selecting diverse team members for professional development courses, speaking engagements, and training opportunities.

In 2022 Employees were also provided with “NASA Guidance for Supporting Gender Transition/Affirmation in the Workplace.” The guidance urged supervisors to, among many other things, “be willing and available to collaborate with the transitioning employee on the development, implementation, and evolution of a Workplace Gender.”

Staffers were told in the Guidance “A transitioning employee may use the restroom, locker room, or other facility that they feel most comfortable using,” and that if another employee has a concern about this, “the transitioning employee should not be asked or required to use an alternate facility in order to accommodate such concerns.”

Equity en Español

A major aspect of NASA’s equity outreach included “limited English” populations. There was therefore a push to translate NASA activities into Spanish, including:

• A Spanish-language NASA comic book

• Spanish-language social media accounts

• Monthly live virtual events for students in Spanish under the NASA STEM Stars initiative. These 20 videos received between 250-3,600 views on YouTube. Outliers are one with 65,000 views and another with 16,000.

• Spanish content on NASA’s streaming service, NASA+

• Spanish training for NASA’s ARSET program, which teaches communities in America how to use remote sensing tools.

CONTRACTS WITH BOEING AND SPACEX

NASA spent around $15 billion in contracts each year from fiscal year 2021-2024, nearly $60 billion total.

Boeing received the 2^nd most contract dollars with $6.4 billion.

Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) was the third highest contract recipient with $5.3 billion.

An Inspector General report from 2024 highlighted issues with NASA’s contracting system, citing:

• An inappropriate use of award fees during periods of poor contractor performance, with $77 million in questionable award fees granted

• Granting sole-contracts to develop parts of machinery used for spaceflight, eliminating cost benefits of competition and making competitive follow-on awards to contracts impossible

• Many examples of waste, fraud, and abuse of the procurement process, which “over the past 3 years resulted in 34 indictments, 24 convictions, 14 suspensions, and 20 debarments, with over $7.7 million in civil settlement fines returned to NASA. In addition, more than $9.6 million in criminal restitution and nearly $33.5 million in civil settlement fines were returned to the U.S. Treasury.”

Boeing

NASA spent over $6.4 billion on Boeing contracts from FY 2021-2025. As described in an earlier section, Boeing is a top contractor for bringing astronauts to the ISS. Indeed, from FY 2021-2024 Boeing received $1.5 billion for projects titled “International Space Station.”

Two other projects make up the bulk of NASA spending on Boeing:

1. $2.7 billion to “provide developmental hardware and test articles, and manufacture and assemble Ares 1 Upper Stage.” This transaction description is curious because the Ares 1 launch vehicle was a low-Earth orbit spacecraft that began development in 2007, but was later scrapped in 2010 and later replaced with the Space Launch System that is currently in place.

When reached for comment, NASA said funding was shifted to the Space Launch System project as a matter of Congressional directive. Performance requirements for SLS were initially defined in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-267). In the Act, NASA was directed to use existing contracts to the extent practicable as noted in the following section of the legislation:

“Modification of Current Contracts.—In order to limit NASA’s termination liability costs and support critical capabilities, the Administrator shall, to the extent practicable, extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts necessary to meet the requirements in paragraph (1), including contracts for ground testing of solid rocket motors, if necessary, to ensure their availability for development of the Space Launch System.”

Taxpayers should be concerned when contracts have descriptions that are no longer applicable to real-life projects, which is crucial for transparency in government spending.

2. $1.4 billion for the “Space Launch System Stages Production and Evolution Contract.” According to a NASA press release, this contract is for Boeing to manufacture core stages for Artemis III and IV, which are a part of NASA’s lunar exploration program. The Space Lauch System rockets are propelled in stages, and Boeing will manufacture parts for that process. The company will also procure materials for core stages for Artemis V and VI, along with other services. The entire contract is worth $3.2 billion.

Boeing’s Big Spend

The stranded astronauts grabbed the headlines, but it was just the latest chapter in an on-going story of exploding costs and missed deadlines for the contractor.

An inspector general report released after the Boeing Starliner failed to return the astronauts showed the company is six years behind schedule and $1.8 billion over budget. The IG report noted severe quality control concerns with Boeing’s products over the years, noting the company was issued 71 “Corrective Action Requests” from 2021 to 2023. The IG report said efforts to address the problems were ineffective and the company has largely been unresponsive to the agency, not only that, but many workers are also unexperienced and unqualified.

Boeing was initially due to release its part of the Space Launch System in 2017 for a cost of $962 million. Now it is expected in 2025 for $2.8 billion.

Space Explorations Technologies Corp (SpaceX)

NASA spent $5.4 billion on contracts with SpaceX, with most spending directed towards two activities:

1. $2.7 billion for “work required for the design, development, manufacture, test, launch, demonstration, and engineering support of the Human Landing System Integrated Lander.” The Human Landing System is a lunar lander that will bring astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

2. $2.3 billion for the “commercial crew program,” which brings astronauts to the International Space Station.

DEI CONTRACTS (FY21-24)

While the Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump Administration move to cancel all contracts and grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s worth looking at how the agency was spending taxpayer dollars on DEI (FY21-24).

• $2,366,122 to LMI Consulting to “incorporate and deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility in the culture and business” of NASA

• $182,281, again to LMI Consulting for “diversity training”

• $90,000 to Neuroleadership Institute for “diversity training”

• $74,000 to Cook Ross, Inc, for “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Training”

• $26,826 to Franklin Covey Client Sales for diversity training for 120 staffers

• $15,000 for a speaking engagement with Dr. Bruce Stewart, the Deputy Director for Training, Compliance, and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Office of Personnel Management in the Obama Administration

Another $9 million was spent on various DEI-related projects involving analytics, assessment, reporting, or other management services.

These figures don’t include the impact of various DEI-related contractor polices, which were extensive, as shown in figure below from NASA’s 2022 Equity Action Plan.

DEI GRANTS (FY21-24)

Grants were largely focused on hard sciences, but many projects had a strong DEI component. Some are listed here:

• $641,090 to Twin Cities Public Television for a project called “NASA Women Inspire Girls to NASA Careers: The Power of Networks to Advance Equity.”

• $287,791 to University of California Irvine for “triangulating NASA data...with local organizations to advance environmental justice in Los Angeles”

• $180,000 to Regents of the University of California for “Earth Science Applications: Equity and Environmental Justice.”

• $100,000 to Rowan University for “utilizing an environmental justice lens and earth science data to enhance greenspace equity, exposure, and experience.”

• $100,000 to the Planetary Science Institute to “help NASA’s planetary science workforce to become more diverse and equitable” because “diversity and inclusiveness along gender, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, generational, and other axes is a business as well as a social imperative.”

• $99,997 to Colorado State University for “leveraging earth science data to heighten awareness of environmental injustices within the U.S. prison system.

• $34,943 to the Oceanography Society for a special issue of the organization’s magazine on “building diversity, equity, and inclusion in the ocean sciences.”

In addition to projects explicitly funding DEI, NASA retooled its grant program, so proposers include DEI in their funded activities, even if it is seemingly unrelated to the project being funded. The following figure from NASA’s 2022 Equity Action Plan explains:

CONCLUSION

NASA is a national—and global—treasure, advancing human understanding of space and promising the possibility of inter-planetary travel. The agency’s projects astound and amaze and are rightly a source of tremendous pride for Americans everywhere.

Progress is hampered, however, by a lack of mission focus between administrations, and, during the Biden Administration, had been especially derailed by an almost comically absurd devotion to DEI concepts that divide and distract from the agency’s critical mission.