NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) has fired its top diversity officer, Neela Rajendra, as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government agencies.
Indian American official’s departure comes after the Washington Free Beacon reported that the lab had changed her title in an effort to keep her after NASA dissolved its diversity division in March on Trump’s orders.
“Neela Rajendra is no longer working at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory],” lab director Laurie Leshin said in an all-staff email on April 10 in a Leadership and Organizational Change Announcement. “We are incredibly grateful for the lasting impact she made to our organization. We wish her the very best.”
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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 Directorate. “We remain strongly committed to supporting our community and extending our long legacy of driving the frontiers of science from space together.”
The staffing shakeup came a week after the Free Beacon reported that Rajendra, who has argued that deadlines undermine inclusion, had not been among the 900 workers laid off by the lab in 2024 due to budget cuts.
Even after NASA axed its central diversity office in response to the Trump administration’s executive orders, the jet propulsion lab kept Rajendra on as the head of employee success, scrubbing “diversity” and “inclusion” from her title but keeping many of her duties the same. The new office, for example, would continue to oversee “affinity groups,” according to a March 10 email from the lab, including the Black Excellence Strategic Team, or “B.E.S.T.”
News of Rajendra’s continued employment came after a pair of NASA astronauts, including Indian American Sunita Williams, were stranded for nine months on the International Space Station. The debacle, which involved a faulty propulsion system, raised questions about whether the agency’s multimillion-dollar DEI budget had translated into safer spaceflight or more competent employees.
In a 2022 presentation, Rajendra criticized SpaceX’s “fast-paced” culture and “failure to promote DEI,” linking those traits to the company’s high attrition rate. Three years later, it was a SpaceX capsule that rescued the stranded astronauts.
According to Rajendra’s JPL bio, since scrubbed from the site, she “builds and strengthens bridges from science to action in behavioral and organizational environments, with a focus on identifying and maximizing the ways that diversity, equity, and inclusion help organizations excel.”
She has advised Fortune 500 companies, scientists, scholars, NGOs, and universities to help them harness insights from cutting edge research to advance the frontiers of social innovation. Bringing these creative thinkers together, she helps build coalitions to transform organizations to be more inclusive and more productive places of work and learning.
Rajendra has forged partnerships with entrepreneurs and local governments in countries such as Benin and Nicaragua to accelerate urban economic development, advised C-suite executives on their talent development needs, and worked with faculty and university administrators to develop social entrepreneurship programs on campuses across the country, such as Cornell, Tulane, University of Maryland, Babson, and Claremont McKenna, according to the bio.
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As Executive Director and co-founder of the Science of Diversity & Inclusion Initiative (SODI, sodi.org), Rajendra built an organization of over 100 social scientists and 15 partner companies, including BlackRock, GE, and Google, to advance evidenced-based approaches to diversity, inclusion and belonging. Through her facilitation and leadership, SODI launched 12 research projects with 8 companies in 4 years, leading to publications in esteemed journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, according to the bio.
Rajendra earned her B.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and her M.B.A. from Wake Forest University.