Removed: broad elevated-privilege accounts, cut from 13,875 in 2022 to 5,385 in 2025, as the work moved to the deliberately narrower Workstation Administrator account — which grew from 5 to 15,698 over the same period.
Outcome: deprovisioning moved with provisioning, which the OIG reads as “shortened time frames for local administrative access”. The 2023 finding that one NASA centre had granted elevated privileges to all of its approximately 6,500 users is now closed.
Reductions are harder to find in writing, which is why NASA’s inspector general report of 28 May 2026 is worth reading. Auditing the two accounts that give NASA staff local administrator rights on their own computers, the OIG found the agency’s process effective and pointed at the trend above.
Worth copying into your own review: the auditors relied on data pulled from NASA’s systems that they “did not independently verify the reliability for all”.
Source: NASA Office of Inspector General, IG-26-008 (28 May 2026)