The National Institute of Standards and Technology Braces for Mass Firings

Sweeping layoffs architected by the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency may be coming as soon as this week at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable.

According to several current and former employees at NIST, the agency has been bracing for cuts since President Donald Trump took office last month and ordered billionaire Elon Musk and DOGE to slash spending across the federal government. The fears were heightened last week when some NIST workers witnessed a handful of people they believed to be associated with DOGE inside Building 225, which houses the NIST Information Technology Laboratory at the agency’s Gaithersburg, Maryland campus, according to multiple people briefed on the sightings. The DOGE staff were seeking access to NIST’s IT systems, one of the people said.

Soon after the purported visit, NIST leadership told employees that DOGE staffers were not currently on campus, but that office space and technology were being provisioned for them, according to the same people.

On Wednesday, Axios and Bloomberg reported that NIST had begun informing some employees that they could soon be laid off. About 500 recent hires who are still in probationary status and can be let go more easily were among those expected to be affected, according to the reports. Three sources tell WIRED that the cuts likely impact lauded technical experts in leadership positions, including three lab directors who were promoted within the last year. One person familiar with the agency tells WIRED that the official layoff notices may come Friday.

The White House and a spokesperson for NIST, which is part of the Department of Commerce, did not yet return requests for comment.

One NIST team that has been fearing cuts because of its number of probationary employees is the US AI Safety Institute (AISI), which was created after former President Joe Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI issued in October 2023. Trump rescinded the order shortly after taking office last month, describing it as a “barrier to American leadership in artificial intelligence.”

The AI Safety Institute and its roughly two dozen staffers has been working closely with AI companies, including rivals to Musk’s startup xAI like OpenAI and Anthropic, to understand and test the capabilities of their most powerful models. Musk was an early investor in OpenAI and is currently suing the startup over its decision to transition from a non-profit to a for-profit corporation.

AISI’s inaugural director, Elizabeth Kelly, announced she was leaving her role earlier this month. Several other high-profile NIST leaders working on AI have also departed in recent weeks, including Reva Schwartz, who led NIST’s Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI program, and Elham Tabassi, NIST’s chief AI advisor. Kelly and Schwartz declined to comment. Tabassi did not respond to a request for comment.

US Vice President JD Vance recently signaled the new administration’s intent to deprioritize AI safety at the AI Action Summit, a major international meeting held in Paris last week that AISI and other government staffers were not invited to attend, according to three familiar with the matter. “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety,” Vance said in his first major speech as VP. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”