Policy Update (8 July 2025)

In a closed-door Town Hall on 25 June, NASA leadership announced that they are working on a top-level reorganization plan for the agency. The Acting Administrator, Janet Petro, expects to finalize the reorganization plans within weeks. There are reports that NASA will be directed to operate at the President's Budget Request (PBR) levels for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY2026) execution if a Continuing Resolution is passed this fall. If this were to happen, the PBR levels would become the de facto operating levels for NASA instead of the FY2024/FY2025 levels appropriated by Congress. This is the subject of significant disagreement about executive power and Congress’s constitutional authority. In the face of such budget uncertainty, NASA employees are being pushed to voluntarily resign, and over 2,100 employees have accepted NASA’s deferred resignation offer since the beginning of the year. As reported by Eric Berger from Ars Technica, dozens of principal investigators have also been asked to submit “closeout” plans, which outline a plan to turn off active missions at the beginning of the next fiscal year. The memos state these closeout plans are meant as a “planning exercise only.” On 8 July, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can move forward with plans to slash the federal workforce. For more information, please check out: 

• NASA’s acting leadership planning new agency structure (SpaceNews) 
• White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act (Ars Technica) 
• Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push (Politico)
• Supreme Court Clears Way for Mass Firings at Federal Agencies (New York Times)

On 3 July 2025, Congress passed their reconciliation package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In case you missed it, we wrote a blog post last week explaining some of the main provisions within this bill. As explained in the post, the reconciliation package does not determine the funding levels for NASA, the National Science Foundation, or the Department of Energy for FY2026 or beyond. The bill does, however, direct the Federal Communications Commission to auction off 800 MHz of radio spectrum, budget an additional $10 billion for NASA human exploration, and provide $85 million to relocate the space shuttle Discovery from Virginia to Texas. 

The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to markup the Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill on Thursday, 10 July. The House had originally planned their subcommittee and full committee markups of the Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill this week, but this was postponed with no new date set. I will be updating this post at the end of the week with a breakdown of the Senate spending bill following Thursday’s markup, along with any updates to the House markup schedule if available. 

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