- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
That’s not even remotely true and is a trite dismissal of legitimate criticism. Further, even though this might be an exciting concept, when put in the context of the massive budget cuts to nasa specifically it’s hard to fully celebrate what might be more a PR stunt than a meaningful commitment to science and exploration.
I don't think Jared Isaacman is interested in PR stunts. He actually seems to care about the science and exploration parts of NASA. Actually, he seems to care about all of NASA.
The $20 billion dollar moon base didn't seem like an announcement grounded in reality, although maybe that was less a PR stunt than the fact that NASA must (literally) shoot for the moon to stay politically relevant.
I read enough HN to know what it is -absolutely- true. HN comments, including this thread, often just read like BlueSky screeds half the time the US, US government or Sam Altman/Elon Musk/etc are mentioned.
They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.
There are users or bots that post political headlines on here with an obvious one-sided bias and do it to farm points, similar to Reddit. It'd be nice to have an impartial forum but it always seems to devolve into an echo chamber.
It's intriguing because little tech as well as big supported the current admin, and installed J.D. Vance to make good on Thiel's $15 million to his campaign.
It would be remarkable if random flailing didn't result in at least one good outcome, and sure enough Trump seems to have unblocked Federal action to eliminate pennies, which is one of those "obviously a good idea but..." things you would never get by ordinary Presidents.
However "Finally deleting the worthless penny" is not a big achievement and so it's understandable that you mistook "Trump constantly does incredibly bad things nobody likes" for them disapproving universally of all US Federal government activity.
It’s not reflexive criticism. Why would anyone work for sn organization where the CEO continuously criticizes its workers and treats them badly. Would you work for Twitter?
I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.
Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?
"TDS" is not a thing. It's a made-up term that people accuse others of, because they can't cover up a felonious president's many failings, lies, graft, and corruption. You use it to try to discredit a person who is rightly criticizing criminality, but you only discredit yourself when you use "TDS".
"Build a website - it's almost like you got the job done already" - Someone in the White House OEOB
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
It is a definition; the transition between the logotype and normal text has an implicit [:}, NASAFORCE: inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Though its an odd choice that they run it in with the paragraph of normal text rather than making that a heading. Of course, with a four day hiring window its a website that exists as pro forma evidence that there was a public website about the hiring effort, the people actually intended to be hired were almost certainly notified in advance out of band, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of effort put into this.
Why is this called Nasa Force when the linked job is for an Areospace Engineer? The usa.jobs site only shows 15 open reqs for Nasa, and they are almost all engineering roles, save a few accounting/finance ones.
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.
> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
> I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa
Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.
Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees
Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.
Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.
That's largely a Mechanical Engineering, Applied Math, and Applied Physics subfield now, not computer science. Most CS majors don't even know what an IVP is, let alone PDEs, nonlinear simulation, etc.
Most CS programs no longer require numerical methods and analysis classes which are critical for this as well as other adjacent subfields like AI/ML theory.
> embedded software
That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now. Most CS programs don't require OS classes anymore let alone embedded programming.
> even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering
The job posting on USAJobs is clear. And most people who are serious about working in the space also know how federal hiring works.
Aerospace isn't a sacred discipline either, and education in CS has very little to do with writing practical software or conducting business.
I think you're about to find out in the next few years how much work it takes to develop a moon base and that dismissing those people as "monkeys" is absurd.
Odd. My laptop seemed to do fine with a 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile [Discrete]' using CachyOS. It could have been a little smoother but it rendered fine. There were a couple spots where it was a little herky-jerky-laggy that maybe needs optimization.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
I got the impression that despite using terms like "mission critical", this isn't about the hardcore technical wizardry behind propulsion and safety.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
It kinda sounds like a post-doc, in that it provides an on-ramp to working in the industry/institution. But without having to waste your time getting a PhD.
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
Ya, I don't understand the calculus. If it's important enough for a big website, why not promote the site for a week first. Too many applications seems more desirable than missing the right people who are 'heads down building' or just not terminally online.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
Guys, I figured it out. This isn't just a 4-day window for an Aerospace Engineer position, that's just the beta test. They're preparing for calling up a wave of volunteer civilians who want to spend a few months on Mars (and maybe even come back).
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
I initially thought this was a call for technologists to commit to volunteering on a deep technical project for four days. That’s not enough time to design a component. But it might e.g. let some minor work on a protocol advance.
That has been the assumption in most of these cases. The agency must already have a list of people they want, so a short window keeps the risk of someone else jumping to the front of the queue.
Isn’t the Office of Personnel Management still under the control of DOGE? I’m wondering if this is an actual internship program or a way to sneak Elon Musk’s SpaceX buddies into NASA.
This is so cringe. Who are the people behind this god awful "national design studio", and how are they related to MAGA / Trump? Assuredly yet another insider cronyism deal that degrades trust in the US government.
Claude:
The National Design Studio (NDS) is a new White House agency that Trump created by executive order on August 21, 2025, as part of an initiative called "America by Design." It lives inside the White House Office of the Executive Office of the President.
The setup
The executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United States
Trump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design Officer
Gebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperwork
The stated goal: overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites and physical government interfaces to be "both usable and beautiful" — Gebbia has compared the target experience to "the Apple Store"
Initial results are required by July 4, 2026 (the US 250th anniversary), and the temporary organization within NDS is scheduled to sunset after three years
I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it), but we want the opposite to be true. Let's find ways to support good people who step up.
Edits (in case my meaning above is not clear):
1. When I write "but we want the opposite to be true" I mean this: if only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. When I write "I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it)" I mean: from an individual point of view, I fully grant that many people would be better off seeking work elsewhere.
3. My experience and scientific research shows that people are not merely selfish actors. While individual incentives matter a lot, perhaps even predominantly, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior with exclusively narrow individualist framings.
4. Many of us act selfishly much of the time, and this is indeed reasonable and even beneficial at times. But taken to an extreme it can be worse overall, even for those individuals. See: game theory, social connections, morality, and so on.
5. When I write "Let's find ways to support good people who step up" I do mean concrete things such as "let's crowdfund ethical people's legal fees" to survive the Trump administration.
I think part of the point of OP was that this isn't a good way to support people to step up. It's frankly bizarre and has dubious future prospects like any other federal program under the current administration.
Given what we're facing, I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time. There's a lot of nationalist language on this site. Even if your motivations are for science, do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
I think it's a bit of, "Be the change you want to see". It may not be a bad thing to get tech folk with sense into these roles. They probably tend to have enough of a cushion to be able to refuse unethical work without worrying about the immediate consequences.
NASA had a nationalist origin and has always kept those undertones even in the modern day, but I don't think anyone's ever accused it of being partisan. I don't believe many Americans associate NASA with any particular president, except maybe JFK, and I don't believe they'd conflate working for NASA with working for Trump.
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
Kind of important that you are a safe individual with no chance of error in your day to day for NASA roles. You could even be pulled in on your "off time" if there's an issue. Seems fine to require it. If you want to join badly, just stop for a few years.
Normally I would agree but I get it with regards to NASA. They do life and death stuff that has like zero margin of error. They probably shouldn't be in the business of hiring people who's edible might be lasting longer than they expected.
- I like the rolling Moon animation very much.
- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.
However "Finally deleting the worthless penny" is not a big achievement and so it's understandable that you mistook "Trump constantly does incredibly bad things nobody likes" for them disapproving universally of all US Federal government activity.
I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.
Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?
Pre-sorting all criticism as reflexive and not necessarily justified is a rationalization for you not trying to understand other perspectives.
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
Though its an odd choice that they run it in with the paragraph of normal text rather than making that a heading. Of course, with a four day hiring window its a website that exists as pro forma evidence that there was a public website about the hiring effort, the people actually intended to be hired were almost certainly notified in advance out of band, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of effort put into this.
"NASA Force: Technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery".
Here's an almost identical one (design-wise): https://genesis.energy.gov/
And another one: https://techforce.gov/
And another one: https://safedc.gov/
All basically the same one-pager with different vibe-coded graphics and like 500 words of text.
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
Either it's "We're hiring ~1000 IT/Engineering specialists across multiple domains" or it's "Hey, just apply on USAJobs for the open positions".
Otherwise it just feels like throwing an application into the black hole of some kafkaesque talent management system.
Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.
Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees
Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
That's largely a Mechanical Engineering, Applied Math, and Applied Physics subfield now, not computer science. Most CS majors don't even know what an IVP is, let alone PDEs, nonlinear simulation, etc.
Most CS programs no longer require numerical methods and analysis classes which are critical for this as well as other adjacent subfields like AI/ML theory.
> embedded software
That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now. Most CS programs don't require OS classes anymore let alone embedded programming.
> even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering
The job posting on USAJobs is clear. And most people who are serious about working in the space also know how federal hiring works.
I think you're about to find out in the next few years how much work it takes to develop a moon base and that dismissing those people as "monkeys" is absurd.
NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Windows by any chance?
This is so strange.. I'm still not even clear on what it's for..
Intern project?
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
Ah yes, that 'waste of times' having to learn things in aeronautics and physics..
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
They specify early to mid career. Imo they're anticipating a ton of applications and bounding it makes reviewing them tractable.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
[1]:https://www.meritalk.com/articles/nasa-opm-kick-off-drive-fo...
[2]:https://meritalk.com/articles/opm-launches-us-tech-force-to-...
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
[1]: https://www.lenis.dev/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Maybe they could try a pilot program somewhere like LGA?
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
the space part gets the most attention
Which links to: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/sKWkWfp
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
What? This sounds like a phishing email from before phishing emails got good.
That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.
Claude:
The National Design Studio (NDS) is a new White House agency that Trump created by executive order on August 21, 2025, as part of an initiative called "America by Design." It lives inside the White House Office of the Executive Office of the President.
The setup
The executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United States
Trump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design Officer
Gebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperwork
The stated goal: overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites and physical government interfaces to be "both usable and beautiful" — Gebbia has compared the target experience to "the Apple Store"
Initial results are required by July 4, 2026 (the US 250th anniversary), and the temporary organization within NDS is scheduled to sunset after three years
Edits (in case my meaning above is not clear):
1. When I write "but we want the opposite to be true" I mean this: if only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. When I write "I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it)" I mean: from an individual point of view, I fully grant that many people would be better off seeking work elsewhere.
3. My experience and scientific research shows that people are not merely selfish actors. While individual incentives matter a lot, perhaps even predominantly, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior with exclusively narrow individualist framings.
4. Many of us act selfishly much of the time, and this is indeed reasonable and even beneficial at times. But taken to an extreme it can be worse overall, even for those individuals. See: game theory, social connections, morality, and so on.
5. When I write "Let's find ways to support good people who step up" I do mean concrete things such as "let's crowdfund ethical people's legal fees" to survive the Trump administration.