White House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space Science

Scientific American

2 days ago

Late last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 —a request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise.
'This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. 'If implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.'
The Trump administration's 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 (NSF), which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science —all space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support.
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The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prize–winning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), 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 $9-billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trump's priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agency's $24.9-billion budget to $18.8 billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agency's Science Mission Directorate —home to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more —is looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet.
'It's an end-game scenario for science at NASA,' says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. 'It's not just the facilities. You're punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You don't just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.'
Adding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administrator —just days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacman's nomination. Initial reports —which have now been disputed —explained the president's 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 'acting' leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agencies' ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. 'What's more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?' Dreier asks.
Actions versus Words
During his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted 'NASA's mission of discovery and inspiration' and looked to a future of 'groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.' More recently, while celebrating Hubble's 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope 'a symbol of America's unmatched exploratory might' and declared that NASA would 'continue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.' The administration's budgetary actions speak louder than Trump's words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space exploration—or even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podium—the president's budget 'narrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,' Dreier says. 'And the cosmos is a lot bigger, and there's a lot more to learn out there.'
Dreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest it's been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASA's budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today China's rapid progress 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 House's budget would do the exact opposite.
'The seesaw is sort of unbalanced,' says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). 'On the one side, we're saying, 'Well, China's kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.' But then we're not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.'
How NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars—goals that the agency now considers part of 'winning the second space race'—while also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear.
'This is Russ Vought's budget,' Dreier says, referring to the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. 'This isn't even Trump's budget. Trump's budget would be good for space. This one undermines the president's own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.'
'Low Expectations' at the High Frontier
Rumors 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 Return (MSR) program 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.
'It's a reprieve from outright termination, but it's still a cut for functionally no reason,' Dreier says. 'In some ways, [the budget] is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.'
In the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from $7.3 billion to $3.9 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. (The Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan would survive, as would the flagship Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launched last October.) NASA's international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agency's involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover.
The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysics—the study of our cosmic home—which 'really takes it to the chin,' Dreier says, with a roughly $1-billion drop to just $523 million. In the president's proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASA's active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASA's contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory.
'This is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,' says John O'Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASA's astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission 'continues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.' This fleet, O'Meara 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 NASA's science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflight—with China's 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 $1 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.
'It cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,' Dreier says. 'It completely flies in the face of the president's own stated goals for American leadership in space.'
Undermining the Foundation
The NSF's situation , which one senior space scientist predicted would be 'diabolical' when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSF's programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cuts—let alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposed—can have shockingly large effects on certain research domains.
'Across the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the president's strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,' 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 Array (ALMA) radio 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 Chile's 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. NRAO's Green Bank Observatory — home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet — 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 collaboration—whose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics—even though both detectors need to be online for LIGO's experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanity's gravitational-wave view of the heavens.
'The consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longer—or not be realized at all,' O'Meara says. 'The universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesn't care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.'
Dreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they won't support the budget request as is. 'This sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,' 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 'the President's Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.'
The Trump administration has 'thrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and we'll end up in the middle somewhere,' Beasley says. 'The mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the future—because it doesn't.'