The last sentence of his post says that's not what they're doing. Your reply is basically just "are too!". How is that not low content posting?
He described precisely what NASA was doing, and combined it with a grammatically ambiguous statement, which you clearly interpreted the other way from me.
He said that in order to reduce its budget further, NASA should not hire staff to replace those who leave. He then followed it up by saying that "they're not doing that".
I interpreted it as "NASA are not hiring staff to replace those who leave", you seem to have read it as "NASA are
not not hiring staff[...]". Since the former interpretation reflects what's currently happening and doesn't rely on a double negation, I gravitated towards it as a much more likely one.
But perhaps I was too generous in assuming that our friend is truthful and somewhat literate. If we instead assume your interpretation, two things come to light:
- My post would unintentionally look like an "yuh uh, they are too!!!"
- Zonk's post would be a deliberate and intentional "nuh uh, they ain't!!!!!"
I don't see how that makes matters any better, why it's worth our time, or why you'd want to talk about it in this thread. It sounds to me like you're trying to divert the discussion from the matter at hand, though I'm not sure why you'd want to do that either.
With that nonsense hopefully out of the way, let's get back on track.
To be honest I really struggled to find NASA staff numbers over time although I guess their budget is a rough proxy for staff numbers.
Let's bring you up to speed, then. Start with
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NASA_FY_2016_Budget_Estimates.pdf - page 600.
Of course, it counts FTEs rather than heads, but I'm sure you'll be able to forgive me if I suggest they're analogous. You can clearly see that, as of 2016, NASA had no plans of replacing the hundreds of staff that left in the prior couple of years.
A more recent budget estimates document (
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy19_nasa_budget_estimates.pdf) provides us with more insight:
Human resource management; including: recruitment, hiring, workforce planning, training, and performance management. In FY 2019, NASA will continue rightsizing its workforce with a reduction of 110 FTE relative to the 2018 Request. NASA will continue to explore opportunities across the Agency to find efficiencies in workforce productivity.(page 622)
From page 701, we can also see that the total civil service FTE count has dropped further from the 2016 projection.
If you want to delve deeper, you can see budgets from 2003 and onwards here:
https://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html(Everything prior to 2003 is broken links, helpfully)
Note that this omits contractors, who are not as well protected by law, and who are much more likely to be booted without having to go through too many steps.