That sound you hear? It’s the United States’ leadership role in space exploration disintegrating in real time.
This week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced it was cutting 550 jobs as part of a “restructuring” scheme. The planned cuts will impact the JPL’s technical and support teams, as well as the business side, carving a huge dent in the storied R&D center’s 5,500-head workforce.
In an announcement, JPL says the layoffs are “part of a reorganization that began in July and not related to the current government shutdown,” which has been ongoing since the beginning of October.
“This week’s action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL’s future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline, and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem — all while continuing to deliver on our vital work for NASA and the nation,” read the announcement.
“The morale has been as low as anyone has seen in decades, maybe ever,” one employee told the LA Times. “The uncertainty is very unsettling… We expect more people will leave in the coming months due to continued uncertainty on the type of work that may or may not come.”
Notably, the JPL is the NASA lab responsible for all five of the agency’s Mars rovers. The robotic explorers, and the body of research they’ve undertaken, are integral to understanding the past, present, and future of our closest planetary neighbor — and a major stepping stone in the effort to eventually land a human astronaut on the red planet.
For example, the latest NASA Mars rover, Perseverance, has been collecting samples from the surface of the planet with the idea that a future mission will pick them up and return them to Earth for careful analysis. The Mars Sample Return project is described as NASA’s “most ambitious, multi-mission campaign that would bring carefully selected Martian samples to Earth for the first time.”
That’s now under threat by Donald Trump’s White House, which appointed interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy to oversee major budget cuts starting in July. The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget is the most drastic single cut to NASA funding ever seen — a reduction of 24 percent to its total budget — and would scrap the Mars Sample Return in its entirety.
That’s all despite the fact that NASA accounts for a piddling third of one percent of all US government spending as of 2024.
Oddly, that’s not slowing down Trump’s spacefaring rhetoric. In April, the president declared that the US must “lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration” — but with this kind of budget, he won’t even make it off the landing pad.
More on Mars: NASA Rover Appears to Catch Photo of Mysterious Interstellar Object From Surface of Mars