On Friday night — the traditional time for cowards to announce important but negative news — the Trump administration released their proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget for NASA (called the Presidential Budget Request, or PBR).

If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all, and are aware of the devastating cuts Trump has enacted for science agencies like NSF, NOAA, NIH, and more, the NASA top line news isn’t surprising: the overall budget has been cut.

What is surprising, even shocking, is the extent of these proposed cuts: the overall budget has been axed by a whopping 25% over last year’s, and science programs — the jewel of NASA’s crown — are cut by a staggering 47%.

FORTY-SEVEN PERCENT. Essentially half.

This isn’t a budget cut. It’s an execution.

I don’t say this lightly. This proposed budget will ring the death knell for NASA as we know it.

In total numbers, the budget will be viciously slashed from last year’s enacted amount of 24.8 billion dollars down to 18.8. That number is then sustained at least through 2030.

For those who say that’s still a lot of money, you need to understand the scale of the national federal budget. The total actual 2024 budget to run the country was about 7 trillion dollars. That means the NASA budget was only 0.004 of the national budget — less than half a percent. For every hundred dollars the US government spent, it put 40 cents in the bucket for NASA.

And what do we get for that? The Universe. 

Missions to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter. Landers on Mars, telescopes that peer through the depths of the cosmos, a fleet of spacecraft monitoring the Sun, the star to which we owe our existence. The abject awe and wonder of images of a glorious cosmos. The first A in NASA is for Aeronautics, too; research that makes air travel better, faster, and safer. NASA science includes observing and monitoring our own planet as well, making satellites that track our water, atmosphere, and land. NASA scientists study climate change, one of the single biggest existential threats to humanity^*.

NASA employs about 18,000 people across all 50 states (and that doesn’t include contractors, of which I was one for many years, and people such as  academics who have NASA grants). NASA partners with space agencies around the world, a diversified portfolio that guarantees the best scientific research always pushing past the cutting edge and accelerating our understanding of, well, everything. 

All this will be lost if Trump’s budget is enacted. It’s a bloodbath.

Killing science has long been a key feature and early move by authoritarians. Stalin elevated Trofim Lysenko, a crackpot who denied biological evolution, and millions starved due the famine sparked by his control of Soviet agriculture. Hitler made it a law that government workers who stood against the Nazis (or who had at least one Jewish grandparent) were to be fired. This resulted in an exodus of Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein and many others who were giants in science at the time. Germany dominated physical scientists before Hitler. After, not so much.

And now Trump is following this same playbook.

Slashing NASA isn’t unexpected, but the extent of the exsanguination is appalling. What also gets to me is the utter insanity of the targets; clearly whoever made this budget has no idea whatsoever of what NASA is doing, or, frankly, anything about science.

The Planetary Society, a wonderful group of people who support scientific exploration, analyzes the PBRs and NASA’s budget every year. They are reporting that “…41 in-development and active NASA science projects, roughly a third of NASA's entire science portfolio” will simply end. Many partnerships with the European Space Agency, a reliable and trustworthy fellow sojourner in scientific and space research, will be terminated. One-third of all NASA employees will be cut overall; Goddard Space Flight Center, which creates and manages a large number of scientific space missions, will suffer a two-thirds reduction.

Two-thirds. I worked at GSFC for many years as part of a team building and testing STIS, a camera that astronauts placed on-board Hubble in 1997. I know so many of these people, and NASA employees are some of the most dedicated, hard-working, and optimistic humans I have ever met. They want to explore the Universe.

And Trump wants to fire them for daring these mighty things.

And in doing so he will hand the future of space exploration over to other countries. As planetary scientist and former NASA Mars science operations team member Tanya Harrison put it, “The fact that the U.S. is turning inward and potentially set to decimate the science from its own space program while China is offering up its recently returned lunar samples for researchers around the world to analyze speaks volumes as to how the tides of science are going to shift.”

Trump is handing over America’s scientific preeminence to other countries, including our enemies.

And it’s all for a lie: this saves money in the sense that starving to death saves on your food bill. Study after study has shown that for every dollar we put into NASA, we get more than a dollar back out, sometimes much more than a dollar.

We don’t spend money on NASA. We invest it.

On top of all this, there’s the disturbing news that Trump’s administration is pulling their nomination for billionaire Jared Isaacman as head of NASA. I always thought his nomination was odd; he seems competent and supportive of both science and NASA’s goals. However, as Trump pulls out all the stops in his attacks on science of every kind, it’s not surprising that someone who supports reality would have their own support yanked by this authoritarian regime. In fact, that is what appears to be the case; Semafor reports that this is why Isaacman was removed from the nomination: as a White House spokesperson said, “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon.” 

“America First”. What a load of crap. If they actually want to put America first, they wouldn’t be destroying what makes the United States a global leader. As usual, everything that comes from this White House is a propagandistic lie.

Even worse, Trump has issued another Executive Order that reeks of fascism; he wants to install political employees who will adjudicate what makes good science, the definition of “good” being research that aligns with the GOP’s desires. As Stand Up For Science’s Colette Delawalla put it, this means a young Earth creationist could be in charge of an agency’s science. Perhaps they’ll put an Apollo Moon landing denier or a flat-Earther in charge of NASA, too. At this point, nothing is too ridiculous to presume. To the GOP, 1984 was a how-to book.

So what can be done?

As bad as this news is, not all is lost. This is a budget proposal, not the actual budget. That is Constitutionally controlled by Congress. They take the PBR under advisement, but the House of Representatives and the Senate come up with their own, independent NASA budgets, which are then reconciled into a single budget proposal that is sent to the President. 

The good news is that, in the past, the Congressional budget has tended to restore a lot of the Presidential cuts, saving NASA from the axe. So there is hope this will happen again.

…on the other hand, this Congress is controlled by Republicans who clearly have abrogated their duty and bent their knee. Trump has repeatedly, illegally, cut funding to agencies that Congress is supposed to control, and they have done nothing to stop him. Heck, just on Friday the Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst defended Trump’s cuts to Medicaid; when someone said that because of it people will die, she said — and this is literally, actually true — “People are not — well, we all are going to die.” 

This is what we can expect from Congress. Let us eat cake.

That is the level of resistance we will see; that is, unless we take action.

There are groups out there who are making a stand.

• The Planetary Society has an action page with links that can help you contact your members of Congress. They’ve also created an interactive map that shows you how NASA Science Mission Directorate activities impact your Congressional district; fodder for that phone call to your Representative^**.
  

• Stand Up For Science has created The Summer Fight for Science, a national effort to stop Trump’s berserker attacks.
  

• 5calls, as always, has our backs, with easy guides on how to contact your reps.

As for me, I plan on calling my Senators (both Dems, though both far more conservative than I’d like) and my Congressperson — who, I’ll note, has his nose firmly planted up Trump’s butt, but who needs to hear from as many constituents as possible that Trump’s plan is bad for the district, bad for the state, and bad for our nation — every day. Literally, every day.

Congress represents us, and We The People need to constantly remind them of that.

We can save NASA. We can save NSF, and NIH, and all the other science agencies being taken over by ignorant, venal, and radical Republicans. And in doing so we can save the lives of many Americans, and save what it is that makes America a country worth saving.

^* I used to say climate change was the biggest threat to humanity. I now argue that spot is taken by the GOP.

^** Correction: I originally wrote this as NASA as a whole, which Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society pointed out to me was a mistake on my part. My apologies for any confusion.

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