Nearly 300 current and former NASA employees have penned an open letter protesting proposed funding and personnel cuts to the space agency.

In a letter titled “The Voyager Declaration,” 131 named and 156 unnamed signatories highlight, “recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”

They call on interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to oppose cuts proposed by the President Donald Trump administration, including a 24% budget reduction and 31% trim to the space agency’s workforce.

“We wish to preserve NASA’s vital mission as authorized and appropriated by Congress,” states the letter, which is styled as a “formal dissent” under NASA’s policy directive handbook.

In addition to workforce cuts, the Voyager Declaration opposes:

• Shutting down of congressionally authorized science missions
• Terminating contracts and grants unrelated to performance
• Ending the agency’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have moved to restore the bulk of the administration’s proposed NASA cuts, which included an early wind-down of key programs under the agency’s Artemis moon-to-Mars efforts managed by Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Voyager Declaration signatories dedicated the letter to the 17 astronauts who have died during missions: the crews of Apollo 1, and of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

“Their legacies underpin every conversation about our shared commitment to safety and dissenting opinions at NASA,” the letter states.

The open letter follow similar statements from current and former employees of the Environmental Protection Agency and of the National Institutes of Health.

It also was made public the same day as a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists that identified a record 402 “attacks on science” emanating from the Trump administration since the president’s inauguration Jan. 20.