Southern California congressional leaders on Thursday, Feb. 1, formally called on White House budget officials to reverse fiscal cuts to the Mars Sample Return program that would lead to layoffs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In a letter to Director Shalanda Young of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Reps. Adam Schiff and Judy Chu, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, urged the executive agency to pull back on the cuts before Congress has finalized its 2024 appropriations.
“This short-sighted and misguided decision will cost hundreds of jobs and a decade of lost science, and it flies in the face of Congressional authority,” they wrong in a letter co-signed by 41 other members of Congress from California, including Reps. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, and Ted Lieu, D-Manhattan Beach, and Tony Cardenas, D-Panorama City.
For months, lawmakers have been calling on the agency to refrain from the cuts, which would hit hard economically and in terms of the science investment that’s already gone into the work, they said.
But last month, JPL director Laurie Leshin said NASA is expecting a budget that could limit Mars Sample Return spending to $300 million for the current fiscal year. That amounts to 36% of the $822 million spent in the previous year and well below the $949 million the Biden administration sought for the program.
The MSR mission, led by JPL in Pasadena, would launch a spacecraft from the surface of another planet and return it to Earth. The mission would carry samples currently being collected on Mars’ surface by the Perseverance Rover—the completion of a decades-long project at NASA, which has been at the top of the agency’s priority list.
According to lawmakers, while the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill passed by the House Appropriations Committee allocates $949.3 million for the MSR mission, equal to the President’s FY2024 Budget request, the Administration and NASA have already directed JPL to begin…
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