The National Science Foundation is eliminating senior staff positions as the Trump administration restructures that agency and eyes major cuts to the federal workforce.
The foundation initiated a “reduction in force” of its Senior Executive Service on Monday, the agency announced to staff in an email obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. The government’s Senior Executive Service, or SES, staffers are the government’s highest-ranking career employees and leaders in agencies across the government.
Affected employees will be moved to new roles, an NSF spokesperson said Tuesday in an email. “Impacted staff will either be reassigned to fill vacant SES positions, non-executive positions, or equivalent positions within NSF,” the spokesperson said.
NSF had previously announced plans to downsize its SES staff in May, the agency said, but those plans were stalled when a district court put a preliminary injunction on the Trump administration’s layoff and restructuring plans across government agencies. The Supreme Court earlier this month overturned that injunction.
The internal staff shuffle comes after NSF “assessed its future mission requirements and identified the need to enhance efficiency to better align with the agency priorities,” the NSF spokesperson said.
The move will reduce NSF’s ratio of executive to nonexecutive personnel from one executive per 17 nonexecutive employees to approximately one executive per 30 nonexecutives, according to the email sent to agency staff.
NSF has lost approximately one-third of what once was an 1,800-person workforce, Jesus Soriano, president of AFGE Local 3403, said earlier this month.
In June, NSF staffers learned that they would be booted from their current headquarters to make room for another agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. NSF employees are still waiting for details about where they’ll be moving.
NSF declined to comment Tuesday about whether the agency is expecting to make additional layoffs.
