NASA employees are bracing for layoffs and budget cuts as the congressional dispute over government funding drags on, threatening several crucial space missions—including some that are already in space.
Earlier this week, hundreds of space advocates met with Congress to try and salvage NASA’s funding, according to The Planetary Society. The White House’s proposed budget for 2026, released in May, would reduce NASA’s funding by $6 billion compared to 2025. Under that proposal, NASA’s science budget would drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. Meanwhile, the fate of almost 40 NASA missions is unknown, after Congress on September 30 failed to agree on a deal to keep the federal government funded for the fiscal year 2026.
How has NASA been affected so far?
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that layoffs were imminent this month, although it is unclear how many workers might be affected, according the Los Angeles Times. The federally funded research center in La Cañada Flintridge, California has already endured two rounds of layoffs that impacted 855 of its employees.
Yet despite the government shutdown, NASA is still focused on sending astronauts to the Moon. “NASA would continue to support Artemis operations during any funding lapse,” the agency wrote in a statement prior to the shutdown. The agency is deep in preparations for its next Artemis mission—Artemis 2—which is set to launch a a four-person crew on a journey around the Moon and back in February 2026.
NASA’s ground teams will also continue to operate its current science missions. “If a satellite mission is in the operations phase, we will maintain operations that are essential to ensure the safety of that satellite and the data received from it.”
But not all its spacecraft are accounted for. NASA’s Juno mission, launched in 2011 to study Jupiter and its moons, surpassed its latest extension deadline during the shutdown and it’s not clear whether the spacecraft is still operational. The mission faces the threat of cancellation under the White House’s proposed budget, and although it hasn’t been officially chopped, its funding has been cut. It remains unclear whether Juno will survive this.
NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX mission, on the other hand, has been saved, Ars Technica reported. A follow-on mission to OSIRIS-REx that’s currently on its way to study an asteroid, Apophis, lawmakers have set aside $20 million for the mission to continue, although the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate are yet to agree on a final budget. OSIRIS-APEX was one of 19 operational missions threatened to be shut down under Trump’s proposed budget.
What’s still unknown
We still don’t know exactly how much funding NASA will have available for each of its science missions going forward. Earlier in September, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee expressed support for several NASA missions under threat by the proposed budget cuts. The House’s commerce, justice, and science budget bill, which allocates funding to federal agencies like NASA, secured more than $24.8 billion for NASA. That’s around the same amount the agency received in 2024 and 2025, but much higher than the administration’s proposed $18.8 billion for 2026.
The committee adopted amendments to a report accompanying the bill, adding the New Horizons mission exploring the Kuiper Belt, Juno, and a series of lower-cost robotic missions to Mars as part of the bill. The report did not, however, allocate a specific amount of funds to go toward these missions, but it did indicate the committee’s overall support.
The last government shutdown in 2018 lasted for 35 days. It’s still not clear how long the ongoing shutdown will last. That means it could be days or weeks until the fate of many of NASA’s most critical space-faring missions becomes known.
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