NASA Staff Rebuke White House Cuts in Rare Public Dissent

Scientific American

4 days ago

More than 280 NASA employees past and present, including at least 4 astronauts, have signed a declaration of opposition to the many drastic changes that the administration of US President Donald Trump is working to enact. The declaration also urges the acting head of NASA not to make the unprecedented budget cuts Trump has proposed.
'The last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA's workforce,' reads the employees' letter to interim administrator Sean Duffy. It argues that Trump's changes threaten human safety, scientific progress and global leadership at NASA.
The Voyager Declaration joins similar protest documents by employees at other US federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The appeals stem from Trump's sweeping campaign to overhaul the federal government, which has led to mass firings of workers and the proposal of steep cuts to agency budgets.
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The declaration is 'about getting our dissent out to the public and saying, hey — this is what's happening at NASA, and this is not OK', says Ella Kaplan, who has signed the document. Kaplan works on a contract basis as a website administrator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and was speaking on her own behalf and not that of her employer or of NASA.
Kaplan says she does not expect Duffy to read the document or to care much about it if he does. When Duffy ran for a seat in the US Congress more than a decade ago, he released a campaign advertisement that featured him wearing lumberjack clothing and saying he would bring his axe to 'topple the big spending in Washington'.
The agency is not interested in sustaining 'lower-priority missions', said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. 'We must revisit what's working and what's not so that we can inspire the American people again and win the space race.'
Staff exodus
The Voyager Declaration, named after the twin NASA spacecraft that are exploring interstellar space, protests against staffing cuts at the agency and Trump's proposed cuts to science funding and other NASA budgets. The agency has fired some employees and pressured others to leave, resulting in the loss of more than 2,600 of the 17,000-plus NASA employees, according to news platform Politico. At least US$118 million in NASA grants has been cancelled outright, and the White House has proposed slashing nearly half of the agency's science budget for next year.
Congress, which sets US spending, might reject at least some of those proposed cuts. But the managers of many NASA science projects have been asked to draw up plans for winding down their programmes even though Congress hasn't finalized the budget — drawing dissent from the declaration's signers. 'Once operational spacecraft are decommissioned, they cannot be turned back on,' the document says. NASA, like other agencies, is supposed to follow spending priorities laid out by Congress, and Duffy, as interim administrator, could theoretically ignore the White House requests until a budget is finalised.
The declaration asserts that since Trump took office, safety has taken a back seat to politics, marking a 'dangerous turn' away from NASA's efforts to make human space flight less risky. Stevens responded that 'NASA will never compromise on safety.'
The document's signers also disapprove of the agency's withdrawal from international missions, saying that such actions threaten partnerships with other nations' space agencies. The White House budget proposal, for instance, would cancel NASA participation in European Space Agency missions to Mars and Venus.
Dissent by employees at other federal agencies has met with mixed reactions. At the NIH, where more than 480 employees signed a Bethesda Declaration, director Jay Bhattacharya has said he intends to foster respectful dissent. But EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has placed more than 100 signatories to a dissenting document on administrative leave, saying he will not tolerate employees undercutting the president's agenda. Staff at the US National Science Foundation are also planning a declaration, according to a leaked version of the document.
Of the 287 signatories to the NASA document, 156 are anonymous.