The Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.
Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.
The shutdown of the library at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026.
Budget cuts, buyouts and early retirements that were part of the administration’s DOGE efforts earlier this year have shrunk the number of both federal workers and private contractors at Goddard to 6,600 from more than 10,000.
The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three — at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — will remain open.
A 2022 master plan called for some consolidation and demolition of facilities at Goddard as well as the construction of new buildings. Ms. Stevens, the NASA spokeswoman, said buildings are being closed because they are outdated or are in an unsafe condition.
Goddard employees, their union and Democratic lawmakers from Maryland have said that the Trump administration sped up the closures in a haphazard manner during the recent federal shutdown, when few people were around the Maryland campus, and that there are no plans for new buildings.
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