Amentum, NASA’s prime contractor for Artemis ground operations at Kennedy Space Center, will lay off 70 workers on Nov. 30 after the space agency decided to bring their jobs in-house and fill them with federal civil servants.
The company disclosed the cuts in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice filed Sept. 25 with the Florida Department of Commerce. The affected employees work in Amentum’s Base Operations and Spaceport Services unit, known as BOSS, at the company’s Space Commerce Way location.
According to the notice, NASA informed BOSS of its decision to insource skills and functions the agency has identified as core competencies, leaving Amentum “unable to continue employment” for workers whose roles are affected by the transition.
The layoffs include 15 engineering technicians, 13 electrical engineering positions, 13 other engineers and 11 test conductors, according to the notice. Fourteen of the 70 affected employees are represented by a union.
In a statement, Amentum said it issued the notice because of changes in contract requirements and reduced work on the BOSS contract, and that it is working closely with NASA as the agency carries out its workforce directive at Kennedy Space Center.
NASA said in its own statement that bringing core work back in-house is meant to use taxpayer resources efficiently and ensure long-term mission success. “It is not a reflection on our contractor workforce, contractor performance, or the companies they represent,” the agency said, referring questions about specific employees to the contractor.
Part of an agency-wide shift
The Kennedy cuts trace back to a workforce directive NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman issued Feb. 6 to carry out President Trump’s December 2025 executive order on ensuring American space superiority. The directive ordered center directors to identify outsourced technical and operational work and propose converting core roles to civil service.
Isaacman has said roughly three of every four people working on NASA programs are contractors. Under the directive, NASA intends to rely on contractors mainly for limited-term assignments, surge staffing and specialized work outside its core competencies. Isaacman has estimated the large contracting workforce adds about $1 billion in overhead each year.
In a May message to the workforce, Isaacman said NASA was targeting roles central to its core competencies held by contractors who work exclusively for NASA, have done so for years and are expected to continue long-term. He said the effort is not aimed at small business contractors or at roles such as facility maintenance, IT and cybersecurity.
NASA has said it has already insourced thousands of employees and plans to keep hiring that way through at least the end of 2026. On Sept. 21, Kennedy Space Center officials posted video of nearly 600 new NASA civil servants taking their oaths of office.
Dwight Deneal, assistant administrator for NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs, described the thinking behind the shift during an Aug. 11 luncheon speech to the National Space Club Florida Committee in Cape Canaveral. Deneal said he was surprised on his first visit to a launch firing room to find most of the people working there were contractors, and argued that capabilities the country depends on NASA to perform every day should be handled by in-house experts.
Financial impact on Amentum
Amentum, which is headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, and employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, has already told investors the insourcing push will cost it. During its fiscal third quarter earnings call in August, executives said they expect a 3% hit to revenue in fiscal 2027, which began Oct. 1. That was up from an earlier estimate of 1% after NASA finalized its workforce plan and shared it with the company.
The company still holds major NASA work. Amentum holds NASA’s $3.2 billion Consolidated Operations, Management, Engineering and Test contract, known as COMET, which covers engineering, ground system development, spacecraft processing, and launch, landing and recovery operations for Artemis at Kennedy through 2033. It also recently secured NASA’s COSMOS contract and a second Center Maintenance, Operations and Engineering contract at Langley Research Center in Virginia.
The layoffs come months after Amentum was hiring for the same program. Following the April flight of Artemis II, which carried four astronauts a record 252,756 miles from Earth, the company held a May 1 hiring fair in Orlando seeking about 100 workers to support the Artemis III, IV and V missions.
This is not the first Amentum workforce reduction at the space center. The company filed a WARN notice in October 2022 covering 188 Kennedy Space Center employees.
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