A potential extinction-level event?

On March 7, 2025, reports emerged that the White House is considering a 25% cut to NASA’s topline budget in 2026, including a 50% cut to the Science Mission Directorate. 

The Planetary Society’s Chief of Space Policy Casey Dreier and Director of Government Relations Jack Kiraly joined Planetary Radio host Sarah Al-Ahmed to discuss what we know about the reported cuts, the impact they would have on space science in the United States and globally, and what The Planetary Society is doing in response. You can listen to the full interview on Planetary Radio.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Al-Ahmed:

This recent news about the proposed budget cuts for NASA is truly dire. So, to start, can you give us an overview of these proposed budget cuts for NASA, specifically for the Science Mission Directorate?

Casey Dreier:

There's a formal proposal that will come out in a few months or even a few weeks: the President's Budget Request. That is the White House saying to Congress, "We propose this for the U.S. government, please give us the money for our priorities."

What we have learned is that the White House is reported to be planning to ask for a 25% cut for NASA's overall top-line budget in 2026. And a 50% cut to NASA's science division would help pay for that cut. 50% in one year to NASA's entire science portfolio is ... It's hard to express how bad that is because, historically, nothing has ever come close to that amount of money disappearing that quickly from these types of projects.

Sarah Al-Ahmed:

How did we learn about this?

Casey Dreier:

Eric Berger from Ars Technica reported it. He had multiple sources, and we have our own sources within the government that have confirmed it. 

The important thing is that the decision is not finalized at this point. This request from the White House seems likely, but there is still time for that to be revised before the official proposal is released.

Sarah Al-Ahmed:

There are some precedents for large cuts to NASA in the past, like the moments after the Apollo program. But you are describing this as an extinction-level event for NASA. What programs and missions do you think are most at risk?

Casey Dreier:

I can only speculate, but if you were the NASA administrator or head of NASA Science and you knew you were losing half of your budget, what would you do? 

 The things that you would want to defend the most would be the missions in their prime phase, so something like Europa Clipper, which just flew by Mars and will not get to its destination for another three to four years. You don't want to cancel that one because it hasn't even had a chance to do its mission yet, and we just spent $5 billion to build and launch it. Missions like this, or like the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the middle of their prime mission.

Then there are the projects that are in their final stages of completion at NASA, being assembled to be launched within the next year or so, like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. With those missions, you're so close to being done and you've already spent all the money. So you’d want to defend those as well. 

Everything else is uncertain. The Hubble Space Telescope, New Horizons’ mission beyond Pluto, the Voyager probes, Perseverance, Curiosity. For each of these missions, even if they’re behaving perfectly well and returning good science and there is no actual reason to cancel them, you may have to cancel them. 

These would be active missions getting turned off in the midst of their capabilities. And they aren't replaceable. It takes a decade to build some of these things.

In addition, you have the academics and students who get their funding through NASA Science. They would have to ramp that down a significant amount. So you would be talking about sudden mass layoffs in academia, and students being forced to leave graduate school because they would no longer have funding through NASA research grants. 

Jack Kiraly:

And I'll just add there's no commercial alternative to NASA Science. You can't go on Indeed and suddenly find a bunch of private-sector planetary scientists. This is an activity that the government undertakes because it is a core function of the public sector. Commercial actors are great partners of NASA and have made certain elements of this cheaper. But there is no private sector Mars rover sitting on a shelf somewhere that you can replace Perseverance or Curiosity with. There's no Pluto flyby mission that is just waiting in the wings at some commercial company. These are partnerships between the government and the private sector, or between the government and research institutions. But the government is a key part of that.

Casey Dreier:

In the last 20 years we have gone through this astonishing rise of commercial capability in space, particularly in the United States, but also globally. And that's amazing. But science as an activity is not something the private sector does. Going to Europa to search for life won't make you money. This is why we have a public sector space program like NASA to begin with. 

I think the closest thing that we've seen is Rocket Lab talking about their mission to Venus. And that's a really cool project that they're doing, but it's an exception that proves the rule. I just had Peter Beck on Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition the other month and he said, essentially, “Look, this makes us no money. We are doing this because we personally think it's really neat. But any other priority will take precedence over finishing this project. This is a nights and weekends project.” 

It is cool that they're still doing it, but it's a completely different approach than what we're talking about with breakthrough exploratory science that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge. That is just not going to be replaced.

And so NASA in the United States is the place to do this. And if we give NASA fewer resources to work with, we will abandon this incredible capability that we have spent the last 65 years building out of nothing.

We have grown up taking this for granted, that we can and will go to other destinations, that we can peer back to the earliest parts of the Universe because we know we want to know about them and it enriches us to learn it. That is an intensely valuable thing that we are able to do. And so to walk away from this in a way that we believe is cavalier would just be a terrible loss.

Sarah Al-Ahmed:

This is one of the moments that The Planetary Society was founded for. Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman created this organization specifically because they thought that they had to justify this kind of science. 

The value that it gives us is not just about scientific understanding. Many industries are built on top of NASA, and the things that we learn and many of the technologies that we use every day are actually the result of NASA science. 

Jack Kiraly:

Recent economic impact analyses at NASA showed a three-to-one return on the taxpayer's investment. So, for every dollar that we spend on NASA, we get three dollars back in the economy. That amounts to $75 billion in the US economy in a single year and over 300,000 jobs. And that's outside of the 17,000 civil servants who work directly for NASA. These are people who are supporting that mission or supporting the industries that support that mission.

This touches all 50 states and involves international partners. We're no longer the only ones in space. Multiple space-faring nations and international organizations like the European Space Agency are making great strides and setting really ambitious goals. Meanwhile, a 50% cut to our science program and a 25% cut overall would amount to the U.S. surrendering future leadership in space.

Casey Dreier:

I think it is also important to mention that ESA's entire budget for everything they do is slightly larger than what NASA spends on science right now. NASA is an order of magnitude larger in terms of its ambitions and capabilities than even our great partners in Europe and elsewhere. So again, there's no one else ready to fill this gap. They will keep doing great science, but it would be at a much lower rate than what NASA has been able to do.

In the bigger picture, what does it say, about our society if we willingly walk into ignorance or abandon a commitment to seeking knowledge? I'm very troubled by these bigger philosophical implications. 

I’ve been thinking about all the things that we know now that we didn't know when my parents were born, right before the space age. When my parents were born, we had no pictures of Jupiter close up. We had no idea what Pluto looked like. We didn't know that the Universe was accelerating. We didn't even know what the Earth looked like from space. In a single person's lifetime, we've developed the tools and the power to come to know so much. And we have the capability to learn so much more, but a cut like this would mean walking away from that. 

Sarah Al-Ahmed:

Do you think we're going to see a lot of pushback against this from Congress given the political tensions going on?

Jack Kiraly:

Congress still holds the purse strings. The Constitution lays out the powers of each branch of government. The presidency has the power to propose a budget for the agencies within the executive branch, but Congress ultimately has to make the determination. They authorize the activities, provide oversight of them, and fund them. 

The White House has not yet issued its formal budget request, so we're still months away from this process playing out on Capitol Hill. But that's why it's so important that we engage now with our legislators and representatives in Congress, as well as with the administration, to try to push back against this drastic cut.

You can go to planetary.org/action right now and write to your members of Congress and ask them to be a champion for science. This is the moment. If you haven't written to your member before, now is the time. 

Casey Dreier:

This is going to be a months- if not years-long response that The Planetary Society is going to lead. And so if you feel like, "Ah, why should I write an email? It's not going to do anything anyway." That's not true. It’s the starting point for a longer, focused, directed effort. And doing something is way better than not doing anything. 

If you really just are not the type of person who wants to make a phone call or write your member of Congress, that's okay. There are other ways to help. You can join us as a member of The Planetary Society. We are independent and don't get our funding from the aerospace industry or the government. Right now, that's an incredible advantage that we are able to stay independent and speak our minds clearly and forcefully about this because we don't have to risk government contracts or any sort of other financial issues. 

What that also means, though, is that we depend on our members to enable us to do this. So the more members we have, the more donations we have, the more resources we have to do this kind of unique work on behalf of space science and exploration. Now is a wonderful time to join, if for no other reason than this helps us push back on these types of threats.