The Space Advocate Newsletter, August 2025

This month

🏛️ Congressional intent is clear: no NASA cuts
🐌 Impoundment-style tactics slow spending
🚨 Oct. 1 fiscal year may see unilateral cuts
📣 Fall Day of Action: planning an immediate response in D.C.

If this were any other time, we’d be popping the proverbial advocacy champagne bottle. As of August, both chambers of Congress have put forward NASA budgets that flatly reject the draconian cuts proposed by the White House to NASA and NASA science.

Instead, we have a White House with a Budget Director who takes a maximalist view of executive power. That, combined with an unempowered NASA leadership seemingly uninterested in congressional views, means we’re keeping our champagne on ice for the time being.

Specifically, there are two major issues we are watching out for:

1) Impoundment

If the Executive Branch declines to spend money appropriated by Congress, this is impoundment and a violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The White House Budget Director has asserted that the President has the right to do this. To overtly do so would spark a constitutional showdown.

There is also the novel proposal of a “pocket rescission”, a bureaucratic trick intended to run out the clock on appropriations provided by Congress. The details are technical, but the outcome is the same: undermining the congressional power of the purse.

Whether these occur is still uncertain. However, there are more subtle ways to delay, deter, and otherwise limit the total amount of money going out the door for various programs.

A new executive order that, among other damaging policy changes, inserts political review into scientific grantmaking and establishes new bureaucratic hurdles for the awarding and utilization of those grants. This, combined with massive staffing losses at NASA, is slowing down the rate at which congressionally approved money is being spent. And for the most part, when the fiscal year ends, any unobligated funds get returned to the U.S. Treasury.

NASA is not transparent about any of these policies, so we’re combing through data reported through official channels to monitor for signs of obvious impoundment. There are no obvious signals yet, but we’re keeping close tabs.

2) Ignoring congressional intent

The fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. We don’t anticipate that Congress will have finished work on funding bills by that point, leading to an almost certain “continuing resolution” (CR) — a temporary spending bill that extends funding levels from the prior year.

Normally, in a CR, the government cannot start or end any program. But this time, the White House is seemingly preparing to implement its budget proposal regardless, which terminate fully a third of all science projects. There are avenues for Congress to legislatively protect against such extreme interpretations (like writing explicit directives into any CR that prevent program changes). We are urging them to do so.

This is why we are hosting our Day of Action in early October. If anything *does* happen, if the White House decides to ignore obvious congressional and public intent by terminating science missions, we’ll be there to push back immediately.

Until next month,

Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society

Want to do something?

The Save NASA Science Day of Action is on Oct. 5 and 6 in Washington, D.C. Join us and 13 other organizations to advocate for space science directly to Congress.

Can't make it to D.C.? Pledge to take online action in support of NASA science on the Day of Action in October.

Our Save NASA Science Action Hub has the latest actions, resources, and updates. We have updated our congressional actions and talking points to help us build on this momentum.

What I’m reading this month

New executive order puts all grants under political control (arstechnica.com)

“Pocket Rescissions” Are Illegal (cbpp.org)

One Fifth of NASA’s Workforce Take Voluntary Departure Options (spacepolicyonline.com)

NASA aiming to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 (space.com)
Also see my interview with Dr. Bhavya Lal, who co-wrote a recent report that inspired this announcement, on this month’s Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition.

Ground Truth

Data visualization and analysis

We’ve rolled out a beautiful new chart format that provides access to print-quality downloads, mobile-friendly sizes, and raw data access for each chart. See all of our NASA budget charts.