Over the last five months, the Trump administration has moved swiftly to carry out its “government modernization effort” and reduce federal spending. As part of this cost-cutting initiative, an estimated 20,000 federal employees have resigned or been laid off as of mid-May. The White House describes this workforce reduction as necessary to eliminate waste and make government more responsive, but in many cases, I fear that what’s being discarded isn’t waste — it’s capacity, expertise and the very foundation of our national security and scientific leadership.
In other words, this is not belt-tightening. It’s intellectual disarmament.
I’ve experienced firsthand what can happen when the importance of a government program isn’t understood. Several of my years as a U.S. Air Force civilian employee were spent as an astrodynamics lead at the Maui Space Surveillance Complex in Hawaii, where I helped pioneer methods to detect, track and predict the behavior of human-made space objects — everything from obsolete satellites to millimeter-scale debris. This work was essential to protecting U.S. space assets and maintaining orbital safety for military and civilian networks, but that didn’t shield it from termination when budget cuts came.
My story is far from unique, but what’s different today is the scale and the apparent indifference to the long-term consequences. Across federal agencies, entire programs are being gutted. Take NOAA, where at least 2,000 workers have departed since January in “a combination of layoffs, buyouts, and retirements,” Vox reported. For fiscal 2026, the agency’s budget could be reduced by 28% if Congress approves the recommendation in the White House’s “skinny” budget document released earlier this month.
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In addition to being the primary source of weather forecasting, NOAA includes the Office of Space Commerce, which is responsible for developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space, the first U.S. civilian-led orbital traffic management platform. TrACSS wasn’t referenced in the skinny budget, but with NOAA on the chopping block, the program could be among those impacted.
This would be a self-inflicted wound, and a serious one at that. TrACSS was designed to be a publicly available, government-regulated service to track space debris and prevent collisions in Earth orbit — a long-awaited and essential capability if commercial space traffic continues to grow as forecasted. Instead, the technology could be offloaded to private industry or quietly dismantled. The problem? No private actor has the same mandate to serve the public good. And the data TrACSS is to curate — timely, trustworthy and interoperable — could now be at risk of being siloed or lost altogether.
While private industry has proved itself capable of taking on a multitude of tasks, it’s a mistake to make deep cuts to government spending under the assumption that the market will be able to take care of everything. Running a nation like a business might sound appealing in stump speeches, but in practice, it’s geopolitically reckless. Businesses are allowed to fail. Countries are not. There is no Chapter 11 for America.
Furthermore, vastly reducing research dollars risks ceding U.S. scientific and technical leadership to other nations. Countries including China, Russia and Iran now have a historic opportunity not just to catch up but to surpass us in key technologies. Just last month, China announced a tenfold increase in funding for its state-led space traffic coordination program, reportedly complete with artificial intelligence-enhanced debris avoidance. Moves like this are not symbolic; they represent a deliberate strategy to gain ground as the U.S. retreats.
Closer to home, these cuts could reverberate throughout the academic and industrial workforce for decades, impacting the ability of U.S. institutions to attract much-needed talent. What message does it send to the next generation of scientists that missions like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are reportedly up for cancellation? Roman is fully assembled, reportedly within budget and on track for its 2027 launch. Based on the annual expenditures on the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, operating Roman would cost a few hundred million dollars annually — which amounts to a rounding error in the entire federal budget. But rather than send this billion-dollar marvel to orbit where it could yield decades of observations, it could now be slated for a storage room to gather dust.
Naturally, the companies and universities who build the components and operate instruments on such missions will have to respond by adjusting their staffing levels. The downsizing has already begun. In Boulder, Colorado — a NOAA hub — local research labs have reportedly cut dozens of staff and frozen new projects.
Here’s how 1,900 members of the National Academies characterized the stakes in an April open letter: “If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.”
Indeed, once degraded, the workforce won’t be easily reconstituted. Experts in fields like orbital dynamics, climate modeling, radiation shielding and quantum sensing are not commodities that can be mass-produced on demand when there’s a crisis that requires their expertise. They require decades of investment and stable funding ecosystems. Already, there’s a growing “brain drain” abroad. When the journal Nature polled U.S. scientists earlier this year, 1,200 of the 16,50 respondents said they were considering seeking work in Europe or Canada.
So, where do we go from here? We must reject the idea that governance is merely a cost center. Government is not a burden. It is the backbone of every functioning civilization. And those who hold the purse strings must possess or seek the technical competence to understand the implications of their decisions. If they don’t, we the people must hold them accountable.
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