NASA’s science budget could be cut nearly in half under an early version of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal to Congress, a move that would terminate billions of dollars’ worth of ongoing and future missions, according to two individuals with direct knowledge of the administration’s plan.
The budget plan, sent to NASA by the Office of Management and Budget, would give NASA’s Science Mission Directorate $3.9 billion, down from its current budget of about $7.3 billion, according to the individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the details.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens issued a brief statement: “NASA has received the fiscal year 2026 budget passback from the Office of Management and Budget, and has begun the deliberative process.”
The budget proposal, though not yet formally submitted to Congress, would eviscerate a long list of planetary and astronomical missions, including the next major NASA space telescope and the agency’s goal of bringing samples of Mars back to Earth to search for signs of ancient life.
NASA’s astrophysics budget would take a huge hit, dropping from about $1.5 billion to $487 million. Planetary science would see a drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. Earth Science would drop from about $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion.
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“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”
The Hubble and Webb space telescopes — celebrated for their long list of discoveries as well as stunning images of the universe — would remain supported under the proposal. However, no other telescope would be funded.
That includes the
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which has been designed to study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth. The hardware of the Roman is in place and being integrated and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Roman is scheduled to launch as early as September 2026.
The budget draft, known as a “passback,” is one step in the process by which the president sends Congress a 2026 fiscal year budget request. Congress has the power of the purse and can rescue programs targeted for termination by the White House.
Massive science cuts would put NASA Goddard in a perilous position.
“It’d be a huge loss to our country, because what the men and women at Goddard do is the foundation for everything else that we do in space,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) told The Washington Post. He said the Maryland delegation will fight back.
“I think there’ll be very strong bipartisan resistance in Congress to cutting missions that are the foundation of our space program,” he said. “This is like eating your seed corn, and it will have very damaging impacts on our space program, on national security programs, and it will undermine our leadership in the area of technical innovation and scientific research.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
