Reducing NASA’s proposed budget “fooled the US leadership in space”
This week, as Part of the funding process for fiscal year 2026, Trump’s White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the Space Agency.
This initial version of the government budget requests approximately 20 percent of the overall decline in the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $ 5 billion from the overall line of about $ 25 billion. However, most of these reductions are focused on the IAEA’s scientific mission, which is monitoring all planetary sciences, earth sciences, astrophysical research and more.
According to NASA’s “repayment” documents on Thursday, the scientific programs of the Space Agency receive approximately 50 % budget reduction. After the agency received $ 7.5 billion for science in fiscal year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed the scientific budget for only $ 3.9 billion for the next fiscal year.
Details of cutting
Among these proposals, two -thirds of astrophysics cuts (to $ 487 million), one piece more than two -thirds to helophysics ($ 455 million), a decline of more than 50 percent to Earth’s science ($ 1.033 billion), and a 30 percent decline to planetary scientific ($ 1.929 billion).
Although the budget continues to support continuous missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Web Space Telescope, this could be a very expected Roman Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory that is simultaneously assembled in two years.
“This sustainable support supports the exploitation of Hubble and James Webb space telescopes and assumes that no funding has been provided for other telescopes,” the documents said.
Other important reductions include finishing the budget for the return of the Mars sample as well as the Davinci mission to Venus. Budget reduction also appears to be a Godard space flight center in Maryland, where the agency has 10,000 employees and government contractor.
The process of repayment
The decline is in line with what ARS Technica was reported exclusively last month, with the Trump administration intended to consider a broad 50 % decline in NASA scientific programs. Publicly, some officials have diminished these concerns. Recently this week, NASA’s acting director Janet Petro described the report as “rumors of truly authentic sources”.
However, experts have become more and more worrying, describing such cuts as an “extinction level” event for what is seen as the Jewel of the Space Agency’s crown. Almost all of NASA’s important achievements have been presented by scientific programs over the past 25 years, including masterpieces such as the genius helicopter flying on Mars, the Horizons New rotated by Pluto, and the discovery of water from water in Encladus.
This repayment document only indicates the repayment of the federal budget process for the fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1 of this year. The budget is manufactured by the White House Bureau of Management and Budget, which is under the supervision of Russell Vough, who has long clarified its anti -science budgeting priorities through its center for the US.
The Trump administration candidate for NASA’s leadership, a private astronaut Jared Isaac, said at a confirmation meeting this week that he strongly supports NASA scientific programs. Isaac is unlikely to be involved in the preparation of this document, as he has not yet been approved by the Senate. Candidates, normally, are excluded from policy before approval.
