Trump's NASA cuts will 'compromise human safety,' hundreds of employees say in letter

CBC

2 days ago

NASA scientists say pending cuts to the space agency could compromise mission safety and pave the way for another tragedy like the 1986 Challenger disaster.
"When you're talking about cuts that appear unstrategic and unthoroughly researched and not motivated by actual improvements in mission safety, then you start to get people worried," Kyle Helson, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, told As It Happens guest host Megan Williams.
Helson is one of 362 current and former NASA employees who have signed an open letter sounding the alarm about "recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission."
In an email to CBC, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens dismissed those concerns.
"NASA will never compromise on safety. Any reductions — including our current voluntary reduction — will be designed to protect safety-critical roles," she said.
$6B US in proposed cuts
U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking a 25 per cent, or roughly $6 billion US ($8.22 billion Cdn), budget cut for NASA as a whole, and 50 per cent cut for the scientific research division.
"President Trump has proposed billions of dollars for NASA science, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to communicating our scientific achievements," Stevens said.
Helson says that's technically true, but wildly disingenuous.
"That's like saying your bicycle is missing one wheel, but don't worry, you've still got another wheel," he said.
Trump's cuts have yet to be approved by Congress, which holds NASA's purse strings. But in leaked audio from a NASA town hall meeting last month, several high-ranking officials said they will be moving ahead with them anyway.
Zoe Lofgren and Valerie P. Foushee, the top Democrats on a House committee overseeing NASA's budget, have said implementing the cuts prematurely would be "flatly illegal" and "offensive to our constitutional system."
The bipartisan committee has called on NASA not to implement the cuts.
Fears of reprisal
The open letter, called The Voyager Declaration, is addressed to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who Trump appointed interim NASA administrator earlier this month. Duffy's office directed calls for comment to NASA.
The declaration specifically cites concerns that, if NASA continues along this path, existing missions will be cancelled, valuable scientific data will be lost, international partners will be abandoned, development programs will be nixed, staffing will be gutted and safety measures will be scaled back.
It follows similar open letters by workers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the latter of which suspended 144 employees who signed.
NASA workers fear a similar retribution.
Roughly half of those who signed the letter did so anonymously, and only four signatories who currently work with NASA are willing to speak out on record, according to Stand Up For Science, the organization that helped organize this letter, and those at NIH and EPA.
Helson is one of those four, and says he's only comfortable speaking because his work with NASA is in co-operation with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a position he says gives him more academic freedom than those employed directly by NASA.
"A lot of my coworkers who are civil servants are very afraid right now, and so I want to use what I perceive to be my advantages in my position to speak out on their behalf," he said.
"People are afraid that they're going to lose their job."
NASA did not respond to questions from CBC about whether it would retaliate against the letter's signatories.
The letter is framed an act of "Formal Dissent," a reference to a NASA policy that empowers employees to speak up against decisions they believe are "not in the best interest of NASA."
According to the New York Times, the policy was put in place after the deadly 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters, when the concerns of some engineers were brushed aside.
The Challenger broke up seconds into its flight on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven astronauts on board. The Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing its crew of seven.
The letter's signatories say they're worried that other policies designed to prevent those kinds of tragedies will be impacted by the cuts.
"The culture of organizational silence promoted at NASA over the last six months already represents a dangerous turn away from the lessons learned following the Columbia disaster," the letter reads.