NASA Funding Delays Raise Alarms for Researchers

When Teddy Kareta arrived at Villanova University for his first teaching position, his NASA grant was meant to come with him. He filed for its transfer in June 2025, then waited. And waited. He worked on the observations and analysis that the government had agreed to pay him for, and waited. His money finally arrived this past spring, near the end of his first year as an assistant professor.

Compared to many of his friends and colleagues, Kareta considers himself lucky. “People were, at first, really quite surprised that it was taking so long,” he said. “By the time the money finally showed up… the common response from my colleagues was like, ‘Oh, thank God, at least it exists.’ Within astrophysics and planetary science, you hear lots of stories about grants just getting delayed so long that, even if they’re not officially canceled or changed or altered, they might as well be.”

Since the start of the second Trump administration, NASA grantees have faced months- or even yearlong delays in receiving already-approved funding, scientists tell FYI. Agency program officers used to make final funding selections; now, they are passing their picks along for “further review.”

NASA’s delays and “information fog,” as Kareta put it, suggest to some observers that political appointees are reviewing research grants, contrary to long-running practice. The White House has sought to codify those reviews across the federal government through a rule proposed in May. More recently, officials discussed increasing control over grants at the National Institutes of Health specifically. Congress has shown bipartisan opposition to both proposals, but researchers fear that science agencies like NASA are nevertheless instituting the practice.

A NASA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the agency’s review practices. The agency’s webpage to check the status of grants is currently “under maintenance” and unavailable.

Confusion over delays

The time between NASA selecting an award and sending the funds varies, but generally takes three months or fewer, said Jack Kiraly, chief of advocacy at the Planetary Society. Now, researchers are facing limbo, waiting as long as a year with no indication of when or whether they will receive the promised funds.

“It seems pretty widespread. It’s a pretty common refrain from the communities I’m talking to,” Kiraly said. Kareta estimated a quarter to a third of NASA-funded scientists in his circle have experienced these funding delays.

Kat Volk, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, had her funding to study the dynamical history of the early solar system arrive in August, four months after the original target date, with no explanation for the delay.

In some cases, researchers have submitted proposals only for the program officer to say they’re unsure if the program will award any funds this year, Kareta said. He added that his colleagues’ officers have been unable to answer questions about the cause of delays or explain what stage of the review process a given proposal has reached.

Volk said she suspects the funding delays come from new approval procedures, though NASA has not publicly announced any such changes. Award notices from program officers now say the proposal is “eligible for further review” rather than simply “selected” as in the past. “It’s not as clear to me who made the final decisions on everything, and what secondary approvals there had to be,” Volk said.

In June, the agency modified its funding solicitations following the publication of the White House proposed rule that would require political appointees to review and make the final decision on all agency grants. The ROSES 2025 solicitation, which includes most of NASA’s research opportunities, now notes that a related executive order mandates these reviews, but gives no information on the agency’s implementation of this requirement.

Grant screening

At NASA, it’s also unclear to awardees why certain proposals are being held up and not others. Kiraly said there is no clear throughline in the type of grants or programs affected. Within the field of planetary science, for instance, some programs are seeing significant delays while others seem to proceed normally, Kareta said.

Science agencies such as NIH and the National Science Foundation canceled thousands of research grants last year, particularly those that administration officials deemed related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, because they did not align with administration priorities. By summer of 2025, researchers had developed an understanding of the “keyword searches” science agencies were conducting to flag and potentially terminate research proposals based on administration priorities, Kareta said. For example, he heard about NASA flagging proposals with the word “bias” — which, for many astronomers, is a technical term related to camera images in low-light conditions.

“We already knew that those were some of the things that might be worth, maybe, not changing your proposal for, but being aware that you might have to answer a question or two about it,” Kareta said. “The thing that I think is concerning… is that it seems like the system overall has become slower and less money is getting allocated compared to expectations, without a clear statement of what’s happening.”

Other changes to the solicitations could be affecting the delays, Volk suggested. The program she applied to in 2025, Solar System Science, consolidated almost all planetary science grant programs into one. More applications covering a wider breadth of topics add time to an already-lengthy review process.

Regardless of the cause, Volk said the funding delays create unpredictability and volatility, particularly for researchers who are entirely grant-supported, like herself. In anticipation of tight funding in early 2025, she reduced her hours to half-time to prolong her existing funds while keeping benefits like healthcare.

“It was still a close call in terms of maintaining enough funding,” she said. “I really rely on being able to plan ahead and understanding: When is NASA going to be soliciting proposals for Research and Analysis? And then, what are the typical timescales from submission to decision, and then decision to funding? And a lot of that has been up in the air lately.”

For Kareta, a big consequence of the funding delays was being unable to hire and train student researchers during the year. “It wasn’t just that we were going to be helping to protect the Earth from dangerous space rocks. We were going to be helping students do the same in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years,” Kareta said. “You need to train them. … You need a steady flow of talent towards these important problems.”

He added that the US is likely to lose out on scientific talent in academia given the current funding environment.

“In a time like this, if I was a hardworking undergraduate thinking, ‘Do I go work in the private sector or do I go to grad school?’, grad school seems like a kind of irresponsible option, in a certain way, when you don’t know, is the government going to keep funding science at the level it has been?” Kareta said.