Just days after former President Donald Trump’s inauguration, NASA employees received a last-minute directive that upended their entire workday.
According to a report from 404 Media, NASA personnel were ordered to remove all mentions of women in leadership from the agency’s public websites.
The directive, which was marked as a “drop everything and reprioritize your day request,” instructed employees to scrub the following terms from public-facing pages by 5 PM ET:
- DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility)
- Accessibility
- Indigenous people
- Environmental justice
- Anything specifically targeting women (e.g., “women in leadership”)
A NASA employee, speaking anonymously, confirmed that leadership was serious about the directive, stating:
“We were absolutely required to scrub all DEI-related or DEI-adjacent topics and terms from all external websites by 5 PM the 22nd.”
A New Face Leading the Change
To carry out these changes, Trump handpicked Janet Petro as the acting head of NASA— a decision that reportedly surprised many within the agency.
Her appointment made her the first woman to serve as NASA’s administrator.
Petro defended the directive in a memo, stating that these diversity-related programs “divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”
However, her stance marks a stark contrast from her previous statements.
In a 2021 interview, while serving as director of the Kennedy Space Center, Petro expressed the opposite view:
“At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility has been paramount to mission success.
The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment,” she said at the time. “KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation.”
Her complete reversal raises questions about whether her hand was forced or if she accepted the position knowing full well what Trump’s agenda entailed.
Contradictory Policies?
On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as a defender of women’s rights— particularly through his crackdown on transgender rights.
However, this NASA directive suggests that his definition of “protecting women” involves erasing public acknowledgment of their leadership roles.
Call it hypocritical, call it paternalistic, but one thing is clear: Trump’s anti-DEI crusade is reshaping NASA and other federal agencies, one deleted webpage at a time.