NASA Jettisons Ex-DEI Chief After Failing to Rebrand Effort to Evade Trump Order – Watts Up With That?

From Legal Insurrection

Meanwhile, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has some great projects lined up for 2025, which will likely be more successful without DEI interference.

Posted by Leslie Eastman 

Legal Insurrection readers may remember my recent post on Neela Rajendra.

Rajendra once held the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Officer role at NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is steeped in the DEI movement, having co-founded the Science of Diversity & Inclusion Initiative (SODI) and advised various organizations on DEI strategies.

The organization retained Rajendra after rebranding her position in an apparent effort to evade President Donald Trump’s executive orders regarding the ending of DEI. She managed to cling to her job, even after 900 others at JPL were terminated.

Less than a week after this evasion came to light courtesy of the Washington Free Beacon, NASA jettisoned Rajendra.

NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory has parted ways with its top diversity officer, Neela Rajendra, after the Washington Free Beacon reported that the lab had changed her title in an effort to keep her.

“Neela Rajendra is no longer working at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory],” lab director Laurie Leshin said in an all-staff email on Thursday. “We are incredibly grateful for the lasting impact she made to our organization. We wish her the very best.”

Leshin added that the newly formed Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success—intended to replace the DEI team Rajendra had led—would be moved to the Office of Human Resources.

A quick review of Rajendra’s vision for her rebranded role demonstrates that it was clearly DEI by another name.

On Mar. 10, NASA brass sent an email stating Rajendra would now be the “Chief of the Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success” — an office that would be responsible for lab “affinity groups” including the “Black Excellence Strategic Team,” the outlet said.

In a LinkedIn job description, Rajendra stated her job as chief of the newly formed office was focused on “unlocking our potential to Dare Mighty things TOGETHER.”

“I believe this change is essential for [Jet Propulsion Lab’s] future success and aligns well with Neela’s strengths and focus over the last year,” director Leshin wrote to staff at the time in an email obtained by the Beacon.

Rajendra led efforts to diversify NASA, including promoting the “Space Workforce 2030” pledge, which focused on hiring women and minorities.

Thanks to X.com and the rest of the new and revitalized media, “business as usual” will not continue under Trump 2.0. Rajendra was not the first one to be identified as a bitter clinger to the woke ways, nor is she likely to be the last.

However, the swift termination shows that bureaucrats who try to evade the orders of the nation’s Chief Executive are not likely to last long…even under another name.

I would like to point out that JPL has a roster of interesting missions planned, including NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar). This is a joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to monitor Earth’s surface changes, including phenomena like earthquakes, volcanoes, and ice sheet dynamics.

JPL is also involved with the Moon Rover Trio called CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) project, which consists of three suitcase-sized, autonomous lunar rovers designed to work collaboratively without direct human control. These rovers are part of a technology demonstration aimed at showcasing the potential for cooperative robotic exploration on the Moon and is set to launch sometime later this year.

The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration, or CADRE, rovers are a trio of suitcase-sized robotic wheeled explorers for which cooperation is the name of the game. They will fly to the moon’s Reiner Gamma region on the second mission by Houston company Intuitive Machines, where they will act as a proof of concept to showcase how robots can work together on another world without the explicit interference of humans.

“We have been in overdrive getting this tech demo ready for its lunar adventure,” Subha Comandur, the CADRE project manager at JPL, said in a press statement. “It’s been nearly round-the-clock testing and sometimes re-testing, but the team’s hard work is paying off. Now we know that these rovers are ready to show what a team of little space robots can accomplish together.”

All of these great projects will likely be more successful without DEI interference.