After 68 Years, Caltech Will Have to Bid to Keep JPL Contract

NASA announced Friday that for the first time in its history, the contract to manage and operate Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be opened to competitive bidding, ending more than six decades in which the California Institute of Technology — Pasadena’s largest employer — has held the contract exclusively.

The current Caltech contract runs through Sept. 30, 2028, with a potential maximum value of $30 billion if all options are exercised, according to a release issued Friday by NASA.

The agency said the procurement process will take several years and that it intends to maintain JPL’s existing physical location and continuity for active and future missions throughout the process.

The news was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

The decision arrives at a JPL already reshaped by four rounds of layoffs since January 2024 — which together have eliminated more than 1,500 positions — for a Pasadena and Altadena workforce affected by the January Eaton Fire, which destroyed the homes of more than 200 JPL employees, then-Director Laurie Leshin said in a statement at the time.

JPL was founded by Caltech researchers in 1936 and was transferred from the U.S. Army to NASA in 1958, when the space agency was established. Since then, every NASA contract for the lab’s management has been awarded sole-source to Caltech, the agency said in its release.

“The rapid growth of the U.S. space economy indicates there may now be a viable competitive market for programmatic and institutional elements of the FFRDC operations,” NASA said in the release, using the abbreviation for federally funded research and development center. The agency said the decision is “part of a broader governmentwide and agency effort to find efficiencies, strengthen performance, and drive mission outcomes faster and more affordably.”

In a joint statement issued the same day to the Caltech and JPL community, Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and JPL Director Dave Gallagher said the announcement “comes as no surprise” and said the university has had a team in place since last summer to prepare for the procurement. “Caltech is well prepared with a team established last summer to ensure we are positioned for success, and we will respond to the request for proposal (RFP) once released,” they wrote.

Rosenbaum and Gallagher said the steps were “part of a typical government procurement process.” They said NASA conducted market research through a Sources Sought Notice and held an Industry Engagement Day in July ahead of the announcement.

The decision was announced as part of a broader NASA reorganization.

In a letter to the agency’s workforce posted Friday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote that the procurement “will take several years, and I do not anticipate it having any impact on the projects underway or the location of the facilities.” He wrote that the competition “provides an opportunity to evaluate management costs, overhead burdens, and ideally find ways to get after the science faster and more affordably.” Isaacman wrote that the reorganization is intended “to concentrate resources towards the highest priority objectives in the National Space Policy and liberate the best and brightest from needless bureaucracy and obstacles that impede progress.”

Under Isaacman’s restructuring, JPL is designated as NASA’s “Deep Space and Robotics Center of Excellence,” with Gallagher continuing as director, according to the letter. Isaacman named Antti Pulkkinen as Acting Director of a new NASA Office of JPL Management and Oversight. He wrote that he is “deeply impressed and grateful for the work of Dave Gallagher as Lab Director.”

NASA in its release framed the move as consistent with broader government practices. The agency cited the Department of Energy, which it said has held full and open competitions for five of its 16 FFRDC management and operations contracts over the past 10 years.

JPL’s mailing address is in Pasadena and the lab was founded by Caltech researchers; its campus sits on Pasadena’s northwest border. Caltech describes itself on its careers page as Pasadena’s largest employer; as of October, the institute and JPL together employed about 7,100 people, a figure that predates the most recent round of layoffs at the lab.

Caltech and JPL leaders said in their statement that the lab has up to five launches planned for 2028 — FALCON, EAGLE, SkyFall, MoonFall, and GRACE-C — and said the lab “remain[s] focused on successfully delivering these missions.” They wrote that the partnership with NASA has produced “the first rovers to traverse the surface of Mars, the first U.S. soft landing on the Moon … and the first (and only) spacecraft to enter interstellar space.”

The next procedural step is NASA’s release of the RFP, which Caltech said it will respond to once issued.