The U.S. authorities’s 2025 fiscal 12 months begins on Oct. 1, 2024. As of the publication date of this text, no funding payments have been handed into regulation, together with the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) laws that allocates cash to NASA. Absent congressional motion on spending earlier than midnight on Sept. 30, the federal government will shut down.
Given the looming deadline and the political paralysis that precedes a nationwide election, Congress is working to cross a short lived extension of present spending ranges fairly than finalize 2025 funding. This would supply extra time to work out the variations between the spending proposals supplied by the Home and Senate.
That plan itself is going through political resistance. The Home desires a six-month extension, which might push ultimate selections into the subsequent Administration and Congress, and the Senate desires a three-month extension into December.
No matter how the momentary spending invoice strikes ahead, there are two competing proposals for NASA funding in 2025, every with its benefits and downsides for key Planetary Society program priorities.
The most important disparity between each proposals and Planetary Society priorities is total science funding. We and different organizations have advocated for a return to $9 billion per 12 months for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. This is able to reverse the multiple billion {dollars} of cuts and inflation-driven losses in shopping for energy which might be besetting NASA’s science initiatives. Neither the Home nor the Senate proposal achieves that stage, however the Senate offers, total, extra funding for science. We’ll proceed making the case for a restoration of funding, a course of that can take time.
Provided that, there are a notable set of priorities inside the two proposals that, when mixed, can present essential assist to vital applications of science and exploration:
