Trump's Budget for NASA Is Absolutely Horrifying

Yahoo

03-06-2025

Earlier this year, the Trump administration revealed its proposed budget for NASA's fiscal year 2026, indicating brutal cuts of unprecedented proportions are coming.
Now, the agency has released new data about the proposal, painting a dire picture of its future. As SpaceNews reports, the documents reveal that thousands of jobs would be cut, and dozens of science missions would be on the chopping block.
The cuts — which would drag the budget to its lowest point since 1961, SpaceNews points out, when adjusted for inflation — would result in the firing of roughly one-third of all civil servants.
The budget would also slash the space agency's science budget in almost half, "nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States," as Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier told Ars Technica in March.
The extent of the proposed cuts is truly baffling, with the Trump administration basically looking to give up on space science altogether in favor of militarizing the Earth's orbit and sending humans to Mars.
The so-called "skinny" budget would result in the cancellation of several key space exploration missions, including NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Other Earth observation programs would also be ripped up, including missions to monitor the planet's gravity field or study tropical cyclones, per SpaceNews.
The budget would also cancel planned missions to explore the surface of Mars, as well as existing operations such as OSIRIS-APEX, which is headed to an asteroid called Apophis.
While NASA's next major landmark space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, wouldn't be entirely canceled, it would be allocated less than half of its previously outlined budget.
Meanwhile, the space agency would be doubling down on establishing commercially funded ways to get to the Moon and Mars, highlighting the Trump administration's sometimes-cozy relationship with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose space company is bound to reap the benefits.
The budget would clear up north of $1 billion for projects connected to sending humans to the Red Planet, indicating the president is willing to closely follow Musk's lead.
The proposed 2026 fiscal year budget is now headed to Congress, where it's likely to meet ample opposition.
"No one is eager to cut NASA science," Dreier told SpaceNews. "No one is out there openly defending and saying that this is a great idea."
In short, if it were to make it through Congress unaltered — which is unlikely, since the agency is supported by many lawmakers — Trump's NASA budget could deal the country's leadership in space an existential blow, allowing adversaries, most notably China, to race ahead.
"It sends a signal that America is stepping back from leadership in virtually every science area, including NASA," former NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld told PBS. "The proposal for the NASA science budget is, in fact, cataclysmic for US leadership in science."
"What we see is a full-scale assault on science in America," representative George Whitesides (D-CA) added. "It is probably the biggest attack on our scientific establishment in history."
"It's a poorly wielded chainsaw," he added.
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