I am looking for opinions on what I should do, but first the background. I am an engineer and for the last 16 or so years I have been working at a research institute dedicated to space science. My education is in physics with a focus in optics and for this institute I have designed and calibrated multiple remote sensing instruments for NASA and others that are currently flying around the solar system measuring various things. This has been a great job and I have been lucky to have it.
Anyway, early in the spring of 2025 I was told via email that I won the Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal from NASA for some of my work the previous decade. This is a great honor and I was really excited to be thus recognized. You can see what this award looks like in this picture. Note: that is not me, merely a picture I found with Google.
The thing is I never received it. Well, not until today.
Back in the spring of 2025 the incoming administration and DOGE was busy firing 25% of the workers at Goddard Space Flight Center, the center that awarded me the medal. I found out about a year after I received the email sharing the news that the person who sent me the email was one of those RIF’d. I found this out because I thought it was weird I never heard anything after the initial notification and decided to email them to find out if I had actually won the medal and how it would be conveyed to me.
This led to a bunch of emails trying to find out anything about the status of the award until I finally got a response from one of mission scientists at GSFC for one of the instruments I designed. They looked around and found the certificate and mailed it to me. It arrived today. It is a a bit dog-eared maybe; it looks like it has been shuffled around an office for a year. Still, I am grateful. Unfortunately, the medal and ribbons did not arrive. The scientist I corresponded with is not really involved in this and I feel weird going back to them, but at the the same time I don’t know who else to communicate with. Googling around I cannot find any information on who I should talk to about awards at NASA.
I would really like the medals; this is a once in a lifetime thing that I would like to give to my kids some day. I am just at a loss. I feel like the government has been completely enshittified and while this is just a little thing, it is important to me. What would you do if you were me?
I have (personally) tried to find contact information for people at NASA that might help me with this and have had no luck. It is impossible (as far as I can tell) to actually get a name or email address for somebody that deals with NASA awards. Going through general (public) contact numbers for NASA has resulted in dead air. I have not yet talked to anybody at my non-NASA lab though I have thought that going to the administrators at my lab and enlisting their help could work. They might be able to get some traction as they regularly speak to directors at NASA and are on a first name basis with many higher ups in Washington.
But I also feel weird about this. I am not a beggar or whiner and the thought of going to the head of my lab or our contracts manager and asking for help in getting an award that I supposedly was given is just… icky. I just hate this whole thing. Maybe I should talk to a therapist before I proceed further as I clearly have some baggage that I did not realize I have.