Budget and staffing constraints call into question NASA’s ability to protect Earth from strikes by large asteroids and comets, according to a new report by the space agency’s inspector general.

Yet in the report, auditors with the agency’s Office of Inspector General identified a lack of long-term strategy and funding projections for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office – which they noted is overseen by a single full-time employee, supported by a single contractor.

“Ultimately, budget constraints and uncertainty and staffing challenges inhibit developing concrete, long-range plans and hurt the planetary defense mission,” auditors wrote.

Some progress has been made.

Since the IG’s previous audit in 2014, NASA has discovered more NEOs, developed procedures to issue alerts to potential NEO events, and committed to the NEO Surveyor. That spacecraft is “a space-based infrared telescope that aims to complete a congressional mandate to find NEOs 140 meters in diameter and larger within 10 to 12 years of operation,” auditors wrote.

SpaceX has been awarded a $100 million contract to launch NEO Surveyor aboard a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 2027. The craft consists of a telescope with an almost 20-inch diameter that will operate in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths, capable of detecting both “bright” and “dark” asteroids, according to NASA.

The IG report comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s initial budget proposal for NASA, which calls for historically large cuts to the space agency in Fiscal Year 2026. The administration is proposing a 2% cut to NEO Surveyor, to $266.3 million, “due to excellent cost performance and early retirement of risks with no impact to the planned launch readiness date,” according to NASA documents.

Starting in Fiscal 2028 – after NEO Surveyor’s planned launch – NASA’s planetary defense spending under Trump’s plan would fall from $346.7 million to $81 million. In the IG report, auditors state that level of funding is sufficient merely to support NEO Surveyor, not to support a cadence of launches that would “advance key planetary defense technologies.”

Among those is an unprecedented chance to study a massive NEO up close. The asteroid Apophis, larger than the Empire State Building, will pass within 20,000 miles of Earth in April 2029. Yet Trump’s budget proposal scrubbed plans to divert the existing OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling probe to explore Apophis – a move auditors questioned.

“Meeting this moment is more than an opportunity to advance planetary defense capabilities and NEO understanding, it could be a goodwill branding benchmark for NASA and the Agency’s planetary defense efforts,” auditors wrote.