Drake says Congress defunded Mars Sample Return, leaving no plan to bring samples home

What was said

""it got so big and so expensive that Congress defunded it last year. So right now there's no plan.""

Drake says NASA’s Mars Sample Return programme—intended to retrieve rock cores cached by the Perseverance rover—was defunded by Congress after cost growth, despite being treated as a top priority by the planetary science community. She characterises the result as a near-term absence of an agreed plan to return the samples to Earth for definitive lab analysis.