The Trump administration is remaking NASA in its own image. Is that really the image we should take to the stars? My latest for The New Yorker takes you inside the DOGE raid on NASA headquarters. A snippet:

NASA headquarters, a bland stone office building that is currently owned by a Korean investment firm, is situated a few blocks southeast of the National Mall. Darren Bossie, the new White House liaison to NASA, arrived shortly after Trump’s Inauguration. Bossie was more or less unknown at the agency, but employees soon found his LinkedIn profile. He had spent four of the past seven years bouncing around conservative politics, with a stint as Trump’s White House liaison to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had worked as a senior consultant for unnamed companies. For the bulk of his professional life, however—from 2006 to 2018—he had been an assistant manager at a Total Wine & More in Palm Beach County, Florida. “That didn’t seem very promising,” a senior NASA official told me.

Read the rest here.

Image credit: The New Yorker