Goddard Facilities Spending

Given the ongoing significance of facilities budgets to NASA Goddard, we want to highlight some of the published data on the funding amounts involved in sustaining Goddard operations and facilities over the years.

We found some of this financial information reported in Goddard Annual Reports. These annual reports include high level financial information about how Goddard spent funding that year, including spending grouped into a category called 'Management & Operations’ . The spending in this category reported  from 2024 going back to 2014 is shown in the blue curve in the graph below.

In the red curve above we calculated the inflation adjusted spending amounts using the Bureau of Labor statistics inflation calculator to convert to current (February 2026) dollars. For added context a second plot below shows the total Center spending over the same timeline  in real dollars (blue) and inflation adjusted dollars (red).

The graphs show how a 'flat' budget actually indicates a significant budget decrease due to inflation. The trends over time clearly shows the Center has lacked the necessary funds to maintain facilities, safety and mission support compared to support levels in past years. In addition, given Goddard and NASA’s aging facilities (called out in a 2024 National Academies report as in need of additional funding), the gap between available funding and real facilities needs is likely magnified.

What we do find difficult to understand from this data, is how the completed and ongoing Goddard building closures substantially address these real budgetary issues. A justification provided by Center management for carrying out the closure of a third of our campus buildings was a promised savings of $10M/year in operation costs and $64 million in deferred maintenance costs, though there has been no transparency on how these cost savings estimates were calculated and whether they fully counter the substantial costs of the moves and divestments.  Putting these amounts in context with the above spending amounts, a yearly cost savings of $10M/year in operating costs would represent only 2% of the 2024 total Center Management and Operations budget. The $64M in deferred maintenance savings would represent approximately 14% of the 2024 spending budget in this category, and that even assumes it were to be spent over a single budgetary year.  How can such small relative potential savings justify such disruptive impacts to Goddard’s workforce, facilities and capabilities?