Proposed Federal Budget Would Devastate U.S. Space Science
June 3, 20258 min readWhite House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space ScienceScientists are rallying to reverse ruinous proposed cuts to both NASA and the National Science FoundationBy Nadia Drake edited by Lee BillingsFog shrouds the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAâs Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photograph from February 25, 2025. Gregg Newton/AFP via GettyLate last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 âa request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise.âThis is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,â says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. âIf implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.âThe Trump administrationâs proposal, which still needs to be approved by Congress, is sure to ignite fierce resistance from scientists and senators alike. Among other agencies, the budget deals staggering blows to NASA and the National Science Foundation, which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science âall space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prizeâwinning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, globe-spanning arrays of radio telescopes, and cutting-edge observatories that stretch from Hawaii to the South Pole. The agency faces a lethal 57 percent reduction to its -billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trumpâs priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agencyâs -billion budget to billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agencyâs Science Mission Directorate âhome to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more âis looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet.âItâs an end-game scenario for science at NASA,â says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. âItâs not just the facilities. Youâre punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You donât just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.âAdding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administratorâjust days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacmanâs nomination. Initial reportsâwhich have now been disputedâexplained the presidentâs decision as stemming from his discovery that Isaacman recently donated money to Democratic candidates. Regardless of the true reason, the decision leaves both NASA and the NSF, whose director abruptly resigned in April, with respective placeholder âactingâ leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agenciesâ ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. âWhatâs more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?â Dreier asks.Actions versus WordsDuring his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted âNASAâs mission of discovery and inspirationâ and looked to a future of âgroundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.â More recently, while celebrating Hubbleâs 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope âa symbol of Americaâs unmatched exploratory mightâ and declared that NASA would âcontinue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.â The administrationâs budgetary actions speak louder than Trumpâs words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space explorationâor even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podiumâthe presidentâs budget ânarrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,â Dreier says. âAnd the cosmos is a lot bigger, and thereâs a lot more to learn out there.âDreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest itâs been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASAâs budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today Chinaâs rapidprogress and enormous ambitions in space would make the moment ripe for a 21st-century version of this competition, with the U.S. generously funding its own efforts to maintain pole position. Instead the White Houseâs budget would do the exact opposite.âThe seesaw is sort of unbalanced,â says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory. âOn the one side, weâre saying, âWell, Chinaâs kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.â But then weâre not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.âHow NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Marsâgoals that the agency now considers part of âwinning the second space raceââwhile also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear.âThis is Russ Voughtâs budget,â Dreier says, referring to the director of the White Houseâs Office of Management and Budget, an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. âThis isnât even Trumpâs budget. Trumpâs budget would be good for space. This one undermines the presidentâs own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.ââLow Expectationsâ at the High FrontierRumors began swirling about the demise of NASA science in April, when a leaked OMB document described some of the proposed cuts and cancellations. Those included both the beleaguered, bloated Mars Sample Returnprogram and the on-time, on-budget Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the next astrophysics flagship mission.The top-line numbers in the more fleshed-out proposal are consistent with that document, and MSR would still be canceled. But Roman would be granted a stay of execution: rather than being zeroed out, it would be put on life support.âItâs a reprieve from outright termination, but itâs still a cut for functionally no reason,â Dreier says. âIn some ways,is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.âIn the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from billion to billion. Earth science missions focused on carbon monitoring and climate change, as well as programs aimed at education and workforce diversity, would be effectively erased by the cuts. But a slew of high-profile planetary science projects would suffer, too, with cancellations proposed for two future Venus missions, the Juno mission that is currently surveilling Jupiter, the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto and two Mars orbiters.NASAâs international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agencyâs involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover.The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysicsâthe study of our cosmic homeâwhich âreally takes it to the chin,â Dreier says, with a roughly -billion drop to just million. In the presidentâs proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASAâs active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASAâs contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory.âThis is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,â says John OâMeara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASAâs astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission âcontinues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.â This fleet, OâMeara adds, is more than the sum of its parts, with much of its power emerging from synergies among multiple telescopes that study the cosmos in many different types, or wavelengths, of light.By hollowing out NASAâs science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflightâwith Chinaâs burgeoning space program as the new archrival. But even for these supposedly high-priority initiatives, the proposed funding levels appear too anemic and meager to give the U.S. any competitive edge. For example, the budget directs about billion to new technology investments to support crewed Mars missions while conservative estimates have projected that such voyages would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more.âIt cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,â Dreier says. âIt completely flies in the face of the presidentâs own stated goals for American leadership in space.âUndermining the FoundationThe NSFâs situation, which one senior space scientist predicted would be âdiabolicalâ when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSFâs programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cutsâlet alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposedâcan have shockingly large effects on certain research domains.âAcross the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the presidentâs strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,â Beasley says.Several large-scale NSF-funded projects would escape more or less intact. Among these are the panoramic Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to unveil its first science images later this month, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Arrayradio telescope. The budget also moves the Giant Magellan Telescope, which would boast starlight-gathering mirrors totaling more than 25 meters across, into a final design phase. All three of those facilities take advantage of Chileâs pristine dark skies. Other large NSF-funded projects that would survive include the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico and several facilities at the South Pole, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.If this budget is enacted, however, NSF officials anticipate only funding a measly 7 percent of research proposals overall rather than 25 percent; the number of graduate research fellowships awarded would be cleaved in half, and postdoctoral fellowships in the physical sciences would drop to zero. NRAOâs Green Bank Observatory â home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet â would likely shut down. So would other, smaller observatories in Arizona and Chile. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a humongous, perennially embattled project with no clear site selection, would be canceled. And the budget proposes closing one of the two gravitational-wave detectors used by the LIGO collaborationâwhose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physicsâeven though both detectors need to be online for LIGOâs experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detectorin Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanityâs gravitational-wave view of the heavens.âThe consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longerâor not be realized at all,â OâMeara says. âThe universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesnât care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.âDreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they wonât support the budget request as is. âThis sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,â said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a recent statement. And in an earlier statement, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations, cautioned that âthe Presidentâs Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.âThe Trump administration has âthrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and weâll end up in the middle somewhere,â Beasley says. âThe mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the futureâbecause it doesnât.â
#proposed #federal #budget #would #devastate
Proposed Federal Budget Would Devastate U.S. Space Science
June 3, 20258 min readWhite House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space ScienceScientists are rallying to reverse ruinous proposed cuts to both NASA and the National Science FoundationBy Nadia Drake edited by Lee BillingsFog shrouds the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAâs Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photograph from February 25, 2025. Gregg Newton/AFP via GettyLate last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 âa request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise.âThis is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,â says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. âIf implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.âThe Trump administrationâs proposal, which still needs to be approved by Congress, is sure to ignite fierce resistance from scientists and senators alike. Among other agencies, the budget deals staggering blows to NASA and the National Science Foundation, which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science âall space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prizeâwinning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, globe-spanning arrays of radio telescopes, and cutting-edge observatories that stretch from Hawaii to the South Pole. The agency faces a lethal 57 percent reduction to its -billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trumpâs priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agencyâs -billion budget to billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agencyâs Science Mission Directorate âhome to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more âis looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet.âItâs an end-game scenario for science at NASA,â says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. âItâs not just the facilities. Youâre punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You donât just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.âAdding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administratorâjust days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacmanâs nomination. Initial reportsâwhich have now been disputedâexplained the presidentâs decision as stemming from his discovery that Isaacman recently donated money to Democratic candidates. Regardless of the true reason, the decision leaves both NASA and the NSF, whose director abruptly resigned in April, with respective placeholder âactingâ leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agenciesâ ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. âWhatâs more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?â Dreier asks.Actions versus WordsDuring his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted âNASAâs mission of discovery and inspirationâ and looked to a future of âgroundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.â More recently, while celebrating Hubbleâs 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope âa symbol of Americaâs unmatched exploratory mightâ and declared that NASA would âcontinue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.â The administrationâs budgetary actions speak louder than Trumpâs words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space explorationâor even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podiumâthe presidentâs budget ânarrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,â Dreier says. âAnd the cosmos is a lot bigger, and thereâs a lot more to learn out there.âDreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest itâs been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASAâs budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today Chinaâs rapidprogress and enormous ambitions in space would make the moment ripe for a 21st-century version of this competition, with the U.S. generously funding its own efforts to maintain pole position. Instead the White Houseâs budget would do the exact opposite.âThe seesaw is sort of unbalanced,â says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory. âOn the one side, weâre saying, âWell, Chinaâs kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.â But then weâre not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.âHow NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Marsâgoals that the agency now considers part of âwinning the second space raceââwhile also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear.âThis is Russ Voughtâs budget,â Dreier says, referring to the director of the White Houseâs Office of Management and Budget, an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. âThis isnât even Trumpâs budget. Trumpâs budget would be good for space. This one undermines the presidentâs own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.ââLow Expectationsâ at the High FrontierRumors began swirling about the demise of NASA science in April, when a leaked OMB document described some of the proposed cuts and cancellations. Those included both the beleaguered, bloated Mars Sample Returnprogram and the on-time, on-budget Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the next astrophysics flagship mission.The top-line numbers in the more fleshed-out proposal are consistent with that document, and MSR would still be canceled. But Roman would be granted a stay of execution: rather than being zeroed out, it would be put on life support.âItâs a reprieve from outright termination, but itâs still a cut for functionally no reason,â Dreier says. âIn some ways,is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.âIn the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from billion to billion. Earth science missions focused on carbon monitoring and climate change, as well as programs aimed at education and workforce diversity, would be effectively erased by the cuts. But a slew of high-profile planetary science projects would suffer, too, with cancellations proposed for two future Venus missions, the Juno mission that is currently surveilling Jupiter, the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto and two Mars orbiters.NASAâs international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agencyâs involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover.The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysicsâthe study of our cosmic homeâwhich âreally takes it to the chin,â Dreier says, with a roughly -billion drop to just million. In the presidentâs proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASAâs active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASAâs contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory.âThis is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,â says John OâMeara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASAâs astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission âcontinues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.â This fleet, OâMeara adds, is more than the sum of its parts, with much of its power emerging from synergies among multiple telescopes that study the cosmos in many different types, or wavelengths, of light.By hollowing out NASAâs science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflightâwith Chinaâs burgeoning space program as the new archrival. But even for these supposedly high-priority initiatives, the proposed funding levels appear too anemic and meager to give the U.S. any competitive edge. For example, the budget directs about billion to new technology investments to support crewed Mars missions while conservative estimates have projected that such voyages would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more.âIt cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,â Dreier says. âIt completely flies in the face of the presidentâs own stated goals for American leadership in space.âUndermining the FoundationThe NSFâs situation, which one senior space scientist predicted would be âdiabolicalâ when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSFâs programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cutsâlet alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposedâcan have shockingly large effects on certain research domains.âAcross the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the presidentâs strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,â Beasley says.Several large-scale NSF-funded projects would escape more or less intact. Among these are the panoramic Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to unveil its first science images later this month, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Arrayradio telescope. The budget also moves the Giant Magellan Telescope, which would boast starlight-gathering mirrors totaling more than 25 meters across, into a final design phase. All three of those facilities take advantage of Chileâs pristine dark skies. Other large NSF-funded projects that would survive include the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico and several facilities at the South Pole, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.If this budget is enacted, however, NSF officials anticipate only funding a measly 7 percent of research proposals overall rather than 25 percent; the number of graduate research fellowships awarded would be cleaved in half, and postdoctoral fellowships in the physical sciences would drop to zero. NRAOâs Green Bank Observatory â home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet â would likely shut down. So would other, smaller observatories in Arizona and Chile. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a humongous, perennially embattled project with no clear site selection, would be canceled. And the budget proposes closing one of the two gravitational-wave detectors used by the LIGO collaborationâwhose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physicsâeven though both detectors need to be online for LIGOâs experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detectorin Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanityâs gravitational-wave view of the heavens.âThe consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longerâor not be realized at all,â OâMeara says. âThe universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesnât care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.âDreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they wonât support the budget request as is. âThis sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,â said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a recent statement. And in an earlier statement, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations, cautioned that âthe Presidentâs Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.âThe Trump administration has âthrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and weâll end up in the middle somewhere,â Beasley says. âThe mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the futureâbecause it doesnât.â
#proposed #federal #budget #would #devastate