Where Congress Stands on NASA's 2025 budget

The U.S. government’s 2025 fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, 2024. As of the publication date of this article, no funding bills have been passed into law, including the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) legislation that allocates money to NASA. Absent congressional action on spending before midnight on Sept. 30, the government will shut down.

Given the looming deadline and the political paralysis that precedes a national election, Congress is working to pass a temporary extension of current spending levels rather than finalize 2025 funding. This would provide more time to work out the differences between the spending proposals offered by the House and Senate.

That plan itself is facing political resistance. The House wants a six-month extension, which would push final decisions into the next Administration and Congress, and the Senate wants a three-month extension into December.

Regardless of how the temporary spending bill moves forward, there are two competing proposals for NASA funding in 2025, each with its advantages and disadvantages for key Planetary Society program priorities.

The biggest disparity between both proposals and Planetary Society priorities is overall science funding. We and other organizations have advocated for a return to $9 billion per year for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. This would reverse the more than one billion dollars of cuts and inflation-driven losses in buying power that are besetting NASA’s science projects. Neither the House nor the Senate proposal achieves that level, but the Senate provides, overall, more funding for science. We will continue making the case for a restoration of funding, a process that will take time.

Given that, there are a notable set of priorities within the two proposals that, when combined, can provide crucial support to important programs of science and exploration:

These “best-of” compromises are readily attainable, even within the current budget caps, and would enable progress on all major exploration-related science initiatives. Even a modest boost to NASA’s top-line would provide the necessary breathing room to enable the continuation of the VIPER lunar resource surveyor, development of the Dragonfly mission to Titan during a critical stage of its development, the launch of both Venus missions no later than 2031, timely restart of Mars Sample Return under a cost-conscious architecture, full science operations of NASA’s great observatories, and continue the startup of the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

We encourage the U.S.-based members of The Planetary Society and the public to contact their congressional representatives to ask for increased support for space science and exploration. Many decisions are yet to be made, and there is still time to demonstrate political support.