'What a waste:' US scientists decry Trump's 47% cuts to NASA science budget

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10 hours ago

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Since January, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House has been asking U.S. government organizations to implement some pretty radical changes. Things have been tense, to say the least. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off with little explanation, programs that improve diversity in the workplace have been eliminated, research grants have been cancelled in large sweeps, and international college students find themselves at risk of losing their legal status.
One government organization that could be hit the hardest is NASA.
The agency has faced a particularly extensive amount of pressure from the Trump administration: surveillance, goal restructuring, website purging and more. Other federal science organizations haven't been spared, either — places like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been targeted as well. The ground of U.S. science seems to be quaking for political reasons rather than scientific ones, leaving scientists disheartened by their government and anxious about what's next.
"I don't think it is an overstatement to say that morale among U.S.-based scientists is at an all-time low," Sarah Horst, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, told Space.com. "People are afraid for their jobs, their students, the projects they've often spent decades working on, and they are afraid for the future of the United States."
And things only got worse on May 30, when the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA came out. It proposes cutting the agency's science funding by 47%, and the agency's workforce by about one-third — from 17,391 to 11,853. This budget has to be officially passed by Congress to take effect, but if it indeed does, the effects could be brutal.
"That would represent the smallest NASA workforce since mid-1960, before the first American had launched into space," Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration and advocacy organization, told Space.com.
"If this budget is made real, I am most concerned about people," John O'Meara, chief scientist at the Keck Observatory, told Space.com. "Missions deliver data and are essential, but the data is meaningless without the people there to interpret it, test theories and share discoveries with the world."
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the White House's 2026 NASA budget proposal is the sheer amount of missions it would cancel altogether: 41 projects, as the Planetary Society said in a statement denouncing the report.
"This is the extinction-level event we were warning people about," Dreier said.
Some specifics: The sharply reduced budget would cancel the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which was meant to bring samples of the Red Planet's surface to Earth — samples that NASA's Perseverance rover has been dutifully collecting over the last few years, and which scientists have long stressed must be analyzed in a lab to reach their full potential.
MSR has experienced its own share of complications since its genesis, to be fair, including a huge price tag and what some believe is an overcomplicated mechanism of sample retrieval. However, cancelling the project outright instead of coming up with a solution would waste much of Perseverance's work on the Red Planet.
The OSIRIS-APEX mission (you may remember it by its previous moniker, OSIRIS-REx) would also be cut off. This mission successfully sent a spacecraft on a multi-billion-mile expedition to an asteroid named Bennu, then had it grab a few pieces of the asteroid before traveling all the way back to Earth and safely dropping the samples to the ground. This same probe is now on round two, headed to examine the infamous asteroid Apophis — but if the FY26 NASA budget is confirmed, it won't complete its trip.
"I'm personally mostly concerned for in-flight missions that already have a significant investment in both taxpayer dollars and peoples' lives/careers (including my own)," Kevin McGill, an employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency's lead center for robotic planetary exploration, told Space.com. "Luckily, my work on [the Curiosity Mars rover] and Mars2020 [Perseverance] are mostly safe, but a lot of other stuff isn't."
The budget also suggests ceasing operations for the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, which has been circling our solar system's gas giant since 2016 while regularly delivering rich information about the world and its moons. Juno is responsible for all those swirly blue images of Jupiter the astronomy community holds high; it took five years for this spacecraft to get to where it is, and many more for it to be built in the first place.
"The operating missions cancellations alone represent over $12 billion of invested taxpayer value — and once they're gone, they're gone. It would take years and many millions more to replace them," Dreier said.
NASA would also need to pull out of its collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Rosalind Franklin rover — for the second time, no less — which is a robotic life-hunting explorer set to launch toward Mars in 2028. NASA had to pull out in 2012 because of budget cuts as well but re-entered the rover program after ESA cut ties with its other partner, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. "This makes the U.S. an untrustworthy partner and our allies hesitate the next time we ask them for help," Dreier said.
Two operational Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey and MAVEN — would be cancelled as well, as would the New Horizons spacecraft currently studying the outer reaches of the solar system and the DaVinci and VERITAS missions, which would explore Venus. The Lunar Gateway, which NASA envisioned as a sort of International Space Station around the moon, would also be cancelled.
"What was surprising was the level of cuts within parts of each of the agencies. An example is astrophysics, where the cut was nearly 2/3 of the astrophysics budget," O'Meara said.
According to the Planetary Society's analysis of the budget, that huge astrophysics reduction could mean eight spacecraft dedicated to studying extreme events in the universe (think, the Chandra X-ray Observatory) would be terminated. This analysis also suggests 10 missions constructed to study the region around Earth and the sun would be cancelled, as well as about a dozen Earth-specific missions that help scientists forecast natural disasters such as hurricanes and track global warming.
The latter is especially concerning, given the speed with which Earth is heating up due to human activities that lead to greenhouse gas emissions — activities the Trump administration favors, such as burning coal for cheap power. Per the budget proposal, the White House also wants NASA to eliminate its "green aviation" spending, dedicated to making airplanes better for the environment, and instead work on "protecting the development of technologies with air traffic control and defense applications."
It is also worth considering that other Trump-mandated moves have heavily impacted climate initiatives as well: more than 800 NOAA workers were laid off, for example, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which houses climate change records dating back to the 1800s, was closed down — leading members of NASA's largest union to speak out in solidarity with their coworkers.
Hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, a huge report that details the dangers of climate change for policymakers to lean on, were also dismissed. (That represented all of the authors of this report).
"This budget request, and its implications, has been highly disruptive to the entire field," O'Meara said. "We are forced to focus on 'what-if' planning that changes in scope rapidly. That takes the time away from what we do best: doing science and sharing it with the world."
Furthermore, the White House's FY26 NASA budget proposal centers around a shift toward human missions to the Red Planet; this was a rare area that saw a budget boost in the President's request.
For example, one slide in the budget summary says NASA should invest "more than $1 billion in new technology investments to enable a crewed mission to Mars." Another says the agency should allocate "$200M for Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) to start launching robotic precursor missions to the Martian surface, and $80M to start deploying communications relay capabilities for Mars."
"It just bothers me that they are changing almost the entirety of NASA's mission to this pipe dream of a human mission to Mars in any reasonable time frame and cost," McGill said.
Space.com reached out to NASA for comment on the possible impact of these budget cuts, and was directed to acting administrator Janet Petro's statement in the proposal's Technical Supplement. This statement is supportive of the budget request overall, mentioning items such as a renewed push for human spaceflight to the moon and Mars.
"The President's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for NASA reflects the Trump-Vance Administration's commitment to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility. With this budget, we aim to shape a Golden Age of innovation and exploration," it reads.
This shift toward Mars crewed missions is perhaps predictable, given Trump's affiliation with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. (Former affiliation, maybe, given the heated feud currently unfolding on social media between the two.)
Musk was a prominent backer of Trump's campaign and worked very closely with him over the past four months. For example, the SpaceX chief ran the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was responsible for the bulk of government funding cuts in the name of saving "wasted taxpayer money." Independently, Musk has earned a reputation as maybe the most outspoken advocate of settling Mars, even going so far as to say he wishes to "die on Mars." SpaceX, as well as its fans, are extremely focused on achieving that goal.
"In isolation, a serious humans to Mars campaign should be exciting — Mars exploration is a worthy goal, and The Planetary Society has advocated for that for years," Dreier said. "But the cost here is too high."
Another concern Dreier has is that the White House expects to achieve this major goal while simultaneously reducing NASA's workforce at an unprecedented rate. "This isn't just poor policy," he added. "It's fundamentally wasteful and inefficient, exactly what this administration is saying it does not want."
And the layoffs could be even more far-reaching than anticipated.
McGill says morale at JPL had already been very low after sweeping layoffs took place last year, but also that the energy was further damaged by the agency's recent return-to-office order. For context, nearly 5,500 JPL employees who have been working remotely since the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic were told they must return to in-person work. The deadlines for that return were Aug. 25 for general employees within California and Oct. 27 for teleworkers living outside the state.
"Employees who do not return by their required date will be considered to have resigned," JPL officials said in a workforce-wide email that was obtained by Space.com.
"It's clear that it's a silent layoff of the over 1,000 remote employees who they don't want to pay severance to," a NASA employee at JPL not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency previously told Space.com.
McGill says the order "threatens to decimate the workforce and a lot of critical institutional knowledge."
"I love JPL and its mission, but it's been a rough time as of late," he said.
According to Dreier, there's good news and bad news concerning whether the budget proposal will go through. The good news is that, as he explains, there seems to be bipartisan dislike for the proposal.
"We've heard directly from multiple congressional offices — Republican and Democrat — that this budget is 'dead on arrival,'" he said.
Of note, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation released his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill on Friday (June 6). The senator proposes dedicating $10 billion more to NASA's science programs — and, though most of it is indeed in line with the FY26 budget request's Mars endeavors, some of that funding would be used for other things, like NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket meant for moon exploration and Lunar Gateway.
This united aversion to the budget proposal is unsurprising. The bipartisan U.S. Planetary Science Caucus, for instance, previously released a statement in response to early blueprints of the proposal that suggested the huge cuts we're seeing presented now.
"We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," co-chairs Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) wrote.
Such agreement across the aisle makes sense when we consider how long it takes for space missions to reach fruition. Collaboration isn't just key — it's unavoidable.
"Spaceflight, and human spaceflight in particular, requires hand-off from one administration to another," Dreier said. "The timelines are just too long for any one presidential administration."
The bad news, however, is the White House may have a workaround.
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"Even if Congress ultimately rejects this budget, the slow pace of legislation and gridlock we've seen in recent years make it unlikely that appropriations will be in place by October 1st of this year," Dreier said. "If there's another continuing resolution, the White House budget office will throttle spending to match the lowest of all possible budget scenarios: theirs. So, we face the possibility of these cuts going into effect by default. Given the breadth and depth of these cuts, that could be very hard to recover from."
"This budget proposal threatens to tear down that carefully constructed coalition in favor of a narrow vision that lacks the political durability necessary for long-term success," he added.
"What a waste."