Science Under Attack Part 1: The White House Makes a Massive Funding Cut Request for NASA, NOAA

In its continued assault on science, the Trump Administration has issued a request for extensive budget cuts to be made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, calling for Congress to eviscerate the science programs of NASA by half, and NOAA’s by three-quarters. These extreme measures could cripple America’s vital climate and environmental research, weather forecasting, and even United States’ space exploration programs. In the first of two articles on these cuts, we will discuss the cuts the White House has proposed for NASA.

The White House Office of Management and Budget’s draft version of the passback budget request, delivered to Congress on April 11, calls for an across-the-board 20 percent cut for NASA’s overall budget for fiscal-year 2026, slashing nearly $5 billion from the previous year’s budget of $25 billion. The document places a focus on eliminating programs within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, a division responsible for NASA’s Earth and planetary sciences, astrophysics and other research endeavors.

The cuts to the Science Mission Directorate itself would see its budget from the previous year of $7.5 billion cut nearly in half to just $3.9 billion; by the numbers, the request calls for:

• a 30 percent cut to planetary science programs, leaving them with $1.929 billion;
• Earth sciences to be more than halved to $1.033 billion;
• heliophysics programs are to be halved, with only $455 million kept out of the dark;
• and cutting astrophysics programs by two-thirds to just to $487 million.

Programs to be cancelled include the highly-anticipated Mars Sample Return and DAVINCI missions to Mars and Venus, respectively; additionally, the iconic Goddard Space Flight Center is to be closed, putting roughly 10,000 highly-skilled employees and contractors out of work.

Support would continue for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), although the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—an infrared telescope scheduled to be launched in May 2027 that, while on-par with JWST, would have focused on phenomena closer to home—has been axed.

The abandonment of the Roman Telescope project is an example of how these indiscriminate cuts are causing more waste than they’re alleged to eliminate: with the observatory already built, tested and nearly ready to go, the cancellation of its mission means that the billions of taxpayer dollars spent over the satellite’s five-year development period have gone up in smoke.

“This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting,” remarked Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier, who also described the cuts as “an extinction-level event for NASA science.”

“It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process,” Dreier added.

“They’re going to run NASA into a very deep ditch if they proceed with this kind of savagery,” former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement to the Washington Post; Nelson also pointed out that these cuts could also have a devastating impact on President Trump’s plans for a manned mission to Mars.

“If you savage NASA science, you have savaged our entire exploration program, and that will affect the human exploration program as well,” Nelson added.

The good news is that these budget proposals are just that—proposals—and need to be approved by Congress to become law. While the House Appropriations Committee is expected to offer resistance to the requests, the cuts may very well be passed by its counterpart in the Republican-majority Senate.

“This massive cut to NASA Science will not stand,” US Representative George Whitesides (D-Ca), stated to Ars Technica. “For weeks we have been raising the alarm about a rumored 50 percent cut to NASA’s world-leading science efforts.

“Now we know it is true. I will work alongside my colleagues on the Science Committee to make clear how this would decimate American leadership in space and inflict great damage to NASA centers across the country.”

Stay tuned to Unknown Country for the second part of this series of articles, where we will discuss the budget cuts that have been proposed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the effects such cuts are expected to have on both NOAA’s research and the organization itself, and the potential impact of losing such a vital institution will have on not only U.S. citizens, but people around the world.