NASA says nearly 1,000 employees accepted resignation offer
In an email, the NASA Office of Communications stated, “About 5% of NASA’s workforce accepted the resignation offer in the Deferred Resignation Program.”
This government program allows employees to resign while keeping all their pay and benefits until Sept. 30, 2025.
Of about 18,000 employees at the U.S. space agency, 900 workers have accepted the resignation offer.
Between the resignations and the possibility of layoffs at NASA, the impact of current and future projects and missions, such as the Artemis moon mission, is unknown.
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, D-FL, who is on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said he is worried about mission delays.
"There's a group of (DOGE employees) who are uneducated on the departments they're walking into, don't know what NASA needs to complete their mission. We already had to delay the Artemis II launch a year.
He stressed that any delay is bad for America and with countries like China, another space race is going on.
Home Insurance
Home insurance is a huge issue in both Florida and California.
Natural disasters, like hurricanes and wildfires, have resulted in higher premiums for homeowners in both states.
"If we can't fix our insurance market, and states like Florida can't fix the insurance market and find a way to stabilize them properly, it really runs the risk of people not being able to afford homes."
Anne Geggis [GAY-gus], with the Palm Beach Post, says lower rates have not been able to offset higher property values.
"The rates are going down. Yes. But the problem is that premiums are not decreasing because they're attributing it to how much homes have increased in value."
Racial gerrymandering lawsuit against Florida allowed to continue
A federal racial gerrymandering lawsuit against the State of Florida was allowed to move forward this month, thwarting an effort by the legislature to have the case thrown out.
A federal judge partially squashed an effort to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the South Florida political nonprofit Cubanos Pa’lante, among others. The groups alleged that four U.S. congressional districts and seven state house districts in Florida were racially gerrymandered.
That means when legislators redrew the voting districts, they used race as the main factor in their decisions — which would violate the U.S. Constitution.
The judge said the plaintiffs have a plausible chance of proving that all seven state districts were illegally gerrymandered — but only one of the congressional ones. U.S. District 26 includes Miami all the way west to Naples.
The ruling allows the plaintiffs to amend their complaint and continue the case against the state legislature.
NAEP Scores Florida
Statewide, student test scores are not back to pre-pandemic levels.
That’s according to a new report that combines scores from The Nation's Report Card with state test results.
Jeff Solocheck [SO-la-CHECK] from the Tampa Bay Times said the state education commissioner criticized the report’s methodology, which only collects data from public schools:
“I don't know what it suggests if we worry that the children on vouchers and in homeschooling and private schools are the ones that we need to test in order for our scores to go up, especially when they only test about four or 5000 kids in the grade level for this test.”
Solocheck says the low test scores are at least partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic when schools sent students home to learn.
More: www.floridatoday.com
