NASA faces massive cuts under a proposed budget
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The Trump administration’s proposal to wipe out a quarter of NASA’s budget has left scientists reeling, with multiple missions and spacecraft facing cancellation.
That proposal was followed by the news that the man slated to lead the agency is no longer up for the role. The intended new leader for NASA, US billionaire Jared Isaacman, had his nomination for the role revoked by US President Donald Trump, leaving the US space agency in turmoil.
“This is the biggest crisis facing the space agency in its history,” says Casey Dreier at the US space-exploration advocacy group The Planetary Society. “We are doing everything we can to try to stop this.”
On 30 May, the Trump administration revealed its full planned budget request for NASA in 2026, following prior widespread reports that the budget would slash science funding at NASA. The budget would allocate $18.8 billion to the space agency, a nearly 25 per cent reduction from the $24.9 billion budget in 2025.
Included would be a cut of nearly half of NASA’s science budget. Major programmes like Mars Sample Return – designed to return rocks from Mars that the Perseverance rover is currently collecting, which may contain signs of life – would be cancelled. Also on the chopping block are the OSIRIS-APEX mission to visit the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis, two proposed missions to Venus and existing missions such as the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission at the edge of the solar system.
The proposal also includes more than $1 billion in funding towards the goal of getting humans to Mars, an endeavour championed by Trump adviser and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk with his new Starship rocket.
The cuts would be “devastating for NASA science”, says Paul Byrne at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “You’re talking about turning off healthy spacecraft and killing stuff that’s in the pipeline. You can’t just turn these things off and back on again.” Other science agencies in the US are facing similar or more severe cuts, such as the National Science Foundation, which may have to close one of its two LIGO gravitational wave observatories in the US as a result.
The day after the budget proposal details came out, President Trump also announced he was removing his nomination of Isaacman as NASA administrator. “I will soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space,” Trump wrote on social media. While the reason for the withdrawal was not entirely clear, Isaacman had previously been critical of the proposed NASA cuts, telling a Senate committee in April that the reduction to NASA science would “not appear to be an optimal outcome”.
That leaves NASA with only an acting administrator at a time when a leader is most needed, says Byrne. “Having an administrator who is empowered to act by the Senate is someone we need right now to push back on these cuts,” he says. NASA declined a request to comment.
The budget request for NASA remains a proposal for the time being and will be debated by Congress – Trump has requested that the budget be finalised by 4 July. That could mean the request is ultimately watered down, or even scrapped entirely, especially considering the proposed cuts would remove funding to many states including some key Republican strongholds such as Texas.
“Trump’s budget will send NASA into a downward spiral,” says Zoe Lofgren, a US representative for California and the top Democrat on Congress’s House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “Democrats are fighting back against Trump’s assaults on our scientific enterprise, and I welcome our stakeholders and members of Congress on the other side of the aisle to join us.”
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