Congressional Chaos Unsettling NASA, Space Industry

Congressional Chaos Follows NASA Into 2024

The year 2023 was dominated by headlines of budget chaos in Congress. NASA was not spared the negative repercussions of this uncertainty, just as the agency is ramping up the Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface.

Astralytical regularly documented this uncertainty, with articles in January, May, August, and November highlighting the risks to NASA from renewed budget austerity, delayed funding allocations, and the risk of a government shutdown.

Sadly for NASA and the space industry, 2024 has not started off any better, and the negative impacts are starting to cut hard.

Congress has still not passed a 2024 budget, which was due October 1st of 2023. NASA is stuck under what is known as a Continuing Resolution (CR), holding the agency (and the entire federal government) at their 2023 budget allocations, which, due to inflation, effectively means a small continuous budget cut.

What are the next steps in the infinity loop of Congressional CRs? What is NASA’s most likely budget outcome? Has any space-related business gotten done in Congress? What is the cost of this chaos?

The answers to these questions will shape not only NASA’s 2024 budget but NASA’s entire science portfolio and the Artemis program itself.

New Speaker, Same Budget Stalemate

Throughout 2023 Astralytical documented the fall of former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and the sudden rise of current Speaker Mike Johnson. This headline story was the best example of the dysfunction in the House of Representatives that was ultimately one of the key negative stressors plaguing NASA’s budget timeline. There was (some) hope that with the ascendancy of a new Speaker Congress could strike a deal and finally bring the budget cycle to a close.

It couldn’t.

President Biden signed the latest CR on January 19th, which extended the “laddered” version passed at the end of 2023. This extends funding for different departments to different dates, setting the stage for two partial shutdowns. The first set of appropriations expires on March 1st includes Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, and Transportation while the second set expires a week later on March 8th and includes Defense, Homeland Security, the Interior Department, and the Commerce-Justice-Science bill that covers NASA. 

There has been minimal progress in passing a full budget, with Congress recently consumed with a bipartisan Senate bill to fund Israel and Ukraine while addressing long-standing immigration concerns at the US southern border. The Congressional calendar is not ideal for deal making either, with both chambers out for much of February on various recesses.

All of this only makes it more likely that Congress, yet again, slams back up against the budget deadlines it imposed on itself with no plan in place. no progress on a deal, and no ability for a Republican House and Democratic Senate to agree on anything, leading to yet more paralysis and uncertainty for various federal agencies, including NASA.

This outcome is not surprising, with Congressional dysfunction increasingly impacting NASA’s fortunes in recent decades. A highly revealing Space Review analysis by Alex Eastman and Casey Dreier from February 2023 perfectly illuminated the growing dysfunction of proper Congressional budget making since the early 1990s and its impact on NASA.

Source: Alex Eastman & Casey Dreier, The Space Review 2.13.2023.

Their conclusion can be summed up with the following excerpt:

“Prior to 1994, Congress had missed just three (NASA) authorizations over the previous 21 years. Since then, they have passed only six…(Partisan) polarization explains why legislation has become less frequent: it has led to gridlock and inaction in a broad sense. We believe it is no accident that the rate of legislation collapsed after the 1994 midterm elections, which ushered in our modern era of divided government where no party lays claim to Congress for very long. The infrequency of NASA authorization legislation also likely feeds into its growth, as various constituencies fight to include their priorities when the stars align to pass one into law,” (Space Review 2.13.2023).

It would not be a stretch to say this is the most dysfunctional that Congress has been in generations, particularly the House of Representatives. Resignations have trimmed the House Republican majority to a razor-thin majority of 3, which can (and often does) shrink due to various absences, which is the smallest majority in the chamber since the Great Depression. This barely-functional majority is highly vulnerable to even a few defections, which regularly grinds action in the House to a halt and upends leadership priorities. 

There has been additional dysfunction on foreign aid and immigration that has consumed valuable time and deepened the level of acrimony on Capitol Hill. It is also clear that some House Republicans haven’t fully moved beyond former Speaker McCarthy’s historic removal, with one Kentucky Republican calling it an “unmitigated disaster” in early February, noting that “all work on separate spending bills has ceased.”

All of this is symptomatic of a Congress that is deeply broken, and 2024 is just the latest chapter in this increasingly dysfunctional budget story. The rabid partisanship consuming Congress shows no signs of abating and NASA and the American space industry are paying an increasingly high price.

Congressional Games Cost JPL As MSR Falters

NASA’s flagship Mars Sample Return (MSR) program is meant to return samples to Earth from the Red Planet, satisfying a ‘holy grail’ for planetary scientists dating back decades.

Yet the mission has been plagued by spiking costs and delays, and late in 2023 Congress sent conflicting and sometimes sharp signals on NASA’s Mars program. Astralytical highlighted Senate threats for deep MSR project funding cuts if cost projections weren’t brought into line, while the House fully funded MSR while targeting NASA co-operation on the European ExoMars mission.

This prompted a series of budget and technical reviews and unilateral program cutbacks by NASA in an attempt to stanche the spiraling situation, freezing progress on the mission.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California that has been hit with over 500 layoffs due to Congressional budget uncertainty. Source: JPL.

This uncertainty has now caused very real impacts. In early January NASA announced the layoff of 100 contractors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that was directly attributed to projected budget cuts. JPL Director Laurie Leshin is quoted as saying:

“Adjusting to such a large budget cut in one year will be painful…It is also becoming more likely that there will be JPL workforce impacts in the form of layoffs, and the way such JPL workforce actions are implemented means that the impact would not be limited to MSR,” (Source: Los Angeles Times, Corinne Purtell, 1.8.24).

The pullback by NASA caused swift bipartisan condemnation from California lawmakers (where JPL is located). Congressman Adam Schiff is quoted as saying that: 

“NASA’s unilateral and unprecedented decision to cut funding for the Mars Sample Return mission, before Congress has finished its appropriations process, is having devastating real world consequences,” (Source: Los Angeles Times, Corinne Purtell, 1.8.24).

On February 1st more than 40 California lawmakers wrote to White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young asking her to reverse the NASA cutbacks to the MSR program. The letter lays out significant concerns with the move, saying that “we are gravely concerned that the Administration’s decision to reallocate funds away from the Mars program would essentially cancel this high-priority program without Congressional authorization,” (Office of Congresswoman Judy Chu). 

The letter hinted that House negotiators are working with Senators on a compromise number to give NASA more certainty about the program, preventing job losses and keeping the mission (roughly) on track.

The MSR review board is scheduled to give their update sometime in the second quarter of 2024. This ensures the project freeze continues for the near term and keeps Congressional appropriators in a bind as the House and Senate seek to reconcile their vastly different visions for this ambitious mission.

Yet this outreach apparently fell on deaf ears at NASA and JPL, because on February 6th the agency announced that they were cutting over 500 jobs. This incredibly painful downsizing is caused directly by Congressional budget cuts and protracted uncertainty:

“After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs. JPL staff has been advised that the workforce reduction will affect approximately 530 of our colleagues, an impact of about 8%, plus approximately 40 additional members of our contractor workforce. The impacts will occur across both technical and support areas of the Lab,” (JPL Workforce Update 2.6.2024).

JPL only recently weathered a significant storm in the form of struggles and delays with the Psyche asteroid mission. Much of the crisis was revealed to stem from overstaffing and underfunding at JPL combined with stresses and distant work dynamics brought on by the COVID pandemic.

This turbulence resulted in delays to Psyche, the effective cancellation of the VERITAS mission to Venus, and substantial review of internal JPL procedures. New efforts were made to retain staff and recruit new high-quality recruits. A follow up report found that JPL had made “outstanding” progress in addressing the range of issues before it.

All of that progress was dealt a body blow with the latest job cuts, which will hurt morale, restrict project bandwidth, and ultimately delay critical science missions.  NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was quite clear, noting that “to spend more than that amount (2023 budget allocation), with no final legislation in place, would be unwise and spending money NASA does not have,” (Politico 2.6.2024).

Just as JPL appeared to have bounced back from previous struggles, Congressional uncertainty and cutbacks reared their ugly heads and kneecapped this critical NASA facility.

Other Space Legislation Stuck In Background

There are other non-budgetary space items that have slowly been inching along in the Congressional background, but election year dynamics makes progress on these bills dicey at best.

The White House and Congress seem set to continue tussling over the nature of federal regulations of space launches and which department(s) should provide that oversight.

The House advanced HR 6131 late last year, the Commercial Space Act of 2023, which would make the Department of Commerce the lead oversight agency for novel space launches. The White House proposal would split oversight between the Departments of Commerce and Transportation, which has generated opposition in both chambers of Congress.

It is unclear which vision will prevail, the ultimate decision having tremendous impact on the future of the American commercial space industry.

Congress appears set to have another go at the possibility of creating a Space Force National Guard. In early February Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) re-introduced his bill to establish a 1,000 person National Guard and the bill has picked up bipartisan co-sponsors, but it didn’t pass in either 2022 or 2023, so its 2024 odds would appear iffy at best.

Flag of the United States Space Force, which may get its own National Guard if Congress acts this year. Source: WIkipedia.

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a number of bills on the docket with uncertain futures. There is the bipartisan ‘NASA Talent Exchange Program Act’ which would allow the private sector and government to temporarily reassign employees from one domain to the other, to another bipartisan bill encouraging NASA to disseminate commercial remote sensing data. There is also the bipartisan (if somewhat vague) ‘Space Resources Institute Act’ to create a dedicated organization to study the utilization of space resources.

The Committee also has a number of partisan bills that could move forward, although this does not mean the bills won’t gain bipartisan co-sponsors in the future. There are Republican-sponsored bills that deal with space situational awareness, space debris, and deep space research while there is a Democrat-sponsored bill that also deals with space situational awareness. 

There are two bipartisan space related bills that passed the Senate last year and await action in the lower chamber. The Launch Communications Act unanimously passed the Senate with the support of space sector giants like SpaceX and Blue Origin and would streamline the FCC process for allocating broadband access for commercial space launches.

The ORBITS Act was also passed last year and would direct NASA to publish a database of orbital debris and develop a plan to remediate dangerous objects.

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee also has a number of interesting non-budget space bills in queue that may or may not see the floor this year.

There are Senate versions of the NASA Talent Exchange Program Act and the ASCEND Act on disseminating satellite data, which may increase their odds of eventually becoming law. There are bills to create a Commercial Space Advisory Committee at the Commerce Department, expand grant opportunities for spaceports, and expand NASA’s ability to enter into support contracts with companies and state governments.

Some of these bills are more likely to advance than others, but none may see the floor of the House with the current state of Congress.

Uncertainty Reigns in NASA’s Budget Future

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from yet another CR under a new Speaker is that this budgetary chaos and delay is now the norm, not the exception, and NASA should expect this budgetary uncertainty for the foreseeable future. Massive layoffs at one of America’s premiere space institutions makes crystal clear the costs of this continued dysfunction.

The same Congress that is almost 5 months late on their 2024 budget is about to start debating the 2025 spending plan as an incredibly tense Presidential election season reaches critical mass. The most likely outcome is that the 2025 budget process reflects the current 2024 budget process, and the odds of a significant budget increase for NASA in the next 2 years are almost completely off the table.

The backdrop for all of this delays to the Artemis program, with the Artemis II launch slipping to 2025 and the Moon landing Artemis III mission pushed into 2026 at the earliest. 

China continues to aim for their first crewed lunar landing before 2030 and recently added Egypt to the list of countries involved in the mission. China also kicked off 2024 by announcing an uncrewed mission in 2026 to the rim of Shackleton crater, the same landing site NASA is targeting with the Artemis program. Reports of Russian developments of a nuclear-based anti-satellite capability in orbit will only exacerbate NASA’s geopolitical backdrop.

NASA will be squeezed by a Congress increasingly beset by budget fights and inexorably drawn to framing the slipping Artemis program as a geopolitical tool against a rising China and a belligerent Russia. This increases the odds that the recent hit to JPL and NASA’s science portfolio is the first, not the last, negative impact stemming from Congressional budget dysfunction.

Astralytical will continue to provide comprehensive analysis of the Congressional budget process and its impact on NASA and the broader space industry.

Patrick Chase is a space writer, political junkie, and lifelong space enthusiast.

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