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Hundreds of employees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have signed an open letter, directed to Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy, criticizing proposed cuts to the agency and condemning recent policies that could potentially harm the U.S.
The letter, titled “The Voyager Declaration” in honor of two spacecraft that were launched by NASA in the 1970s (that continue to zoom beyond the boundaries of the Solar System to this day), states that cuts proposed by the Trump administration are “arbitrary” and “in defiance of congressional appropriations” already promised to the agency.
The letter is addressed to Duffy, who Trump appointed to serve as interim administrator for NASA earlier this month.
“Recent policies” within the Trump administration “have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission,” the letter-signers stated, noting that the “last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce.”
The signers say they are concerned about myriad issues, including the ending of missions that Congress has previously funded; “indiscriminate cuts” to science and aeronautics research that will “leave the American people without the unique public good that NASA provides”; “non-strategic staffing reductions” that the administration is seeking to impose; and the canceling of international missions, abandoning U.S. allies, among other items.
“We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources,” the letter-writers added.
In total, the letter, which was coordinated by the nonprofit group Stand Up for Science, includes 287 signatories, including 131 people who opted to publicly list their names. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal would cut NASA funding by nearly a quarter of its current levels, and would fire nearly a third of its workers, representing the largest single-year-cut in the agency’s history.
Congress is in disagreement with the cuts proposed by Trump, but its own funding reductions would also be significant. While funding levels would, on paper, be about the same, the GOP House budget proposal would scrap NASA’s science budget by roughly 17 percent.
Other governmental agencies have attempted to sway the administration’s thinking through open letter campaigns like NASA’s, with little success, and sometimes terrible outcomes. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, crafted a similar open letter, after which the administration fired 144 workers who had signed onto the letter.
Workers at NASA have expressed low morale over the Trump White House’s actions so far.
“We’re all scared that we’re going to get laid off. We’re scared of retaliation. We huddle in the bathroom. We go to the bathroom to talk to each other, and look under the stalls to make sure that no one else is there before we talk,’ said Monica Gorman, an operations research analyst at NASA, describing the tense atmosphere to The New York Times.
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