There’s Something Extremely Shady About Trump’s Disastrous New NASA Budget
Months after the congress voted against In the wake of the Trump administration’s brutal NASA budget proposal for fiscal 2026, the White House has renewed efforts to deal a devastating blow to the space agency’s science directorate.
Earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its report. proposed 2027 senior claimThis would gut NASA’s science budget by a whopping 47 percent and reduce the agency’s overall funding by 23 percent. This move by the Trump administration persistently and determinedly anti-science agendais once again drawing angry reactions from space advocacy groups.
Worse, Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society’s chief of space policy said space.comThe final document is incredibly vague and fails to identify which space science missions will be doomed. It even refuses to list the previous year’s funding levels; This is a surprising departure from 60 years of institutional history.
“There are two things: a staggering lack of transparency and an abject refusal to acknowledge political reality,” Dreier said. “This is the least transparent NASA budget request I have ever seen, and I have reviewed literally every single one since 1960.”
Dreier also pointed out that the White House allocated $438 million for “Mars Technology” without giving further cost breakdowns.
The 2027 request also appears to largely ignore Congress’ insistence on keeping NASA well-funded. Lawmakers loudly rejected the White House’s 2026 budget proposal proposed by Dreier. described last year as “an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States.”
In other words, the Trump administration’s latest request turns out to be, as Dreier said, a “copy-paste budget” from its last attempt. space.comcalling it “sloppy and unprofessional”.
The document even contains serious errors that could have been easily caught; Dreier noted that he listed the Mars Sample Return mission as a line item even though it was canceled last year, and that NASA misreported the fiscal year for funding for the groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope.
While funding for future Moon missions, including NASA’s signature Artemis program, remains largely intact, space science, which relies on long-term public funding, could take a big hit.
“This is the essence of why we have public investment in basic science,” Dreier said space.com. “Just because SpaceX is so good and launching rockets doesn’t mean it’s now easy to get high-quality scientific data on Mars.”
“The two activities are very different, but they are often put together,” he added.
Despite the document’s errors and ambiguity, NASA’s leadership stands behind the Trump administration’s attempts to largely dismantle the agency’s science mission. Executive Jared Isaacman defended 2027 budget proposal, tells CBS News He said the agency would still have enough resources to “get to the Moon.”
Room said CNN “NASA’s science budget is larger than all other space agencies worldwide combined,” he said in a separate interview.
“I strongly support the President’s fiscal policies and authority to increase efficiency,” Isaacman wrote in an April 3 memo to NASA employees. Quoted by Space News.
The fate of NASA is once again in the hands of lawmakers. Considering how the 2026 proposal has panned out, there’s a good chance a bipartisan group in Congress will once again turn down the White House request.
Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) he defended in a statement this week that cutting funding for science missions would be a “mistake.”
“I will try to lead the subcommittee and the full committee to put us in a position to fund NASA, NOAA, and our other agencies in a manner that is very similar to what we did last year,” he said.
But upcoming midterm elections could soon complicate matters further and delay an almost guaranteed overhaul.
In short, OMB’s latest budget request appears to be little more than a clumsily crafted document designed to hinder, not support, NASA’s operations, underscoring the White House’s blatant disregard for anything unrelated to sending astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
“Members of both parties understand that dismantling the U.S. space science program is shortsighted, wasteful and a strategic mistake,” Dreier said. space.com.
More about NASA’s budget: The White House Is Still Desperately Trying to Cut NASA’s Budget
