Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.
The initial draft of President Donald Trump’s budget request proposes devastating cuts to NASA’s science research, future space missions, and field centers. The draft budget request, reported by Ars Technica and The Washington Post, proposes an overall 20% cut to NASA’s budget, from about $25 billion to $20 billion.
“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, told The Washington Post. “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 overwhelming majority of the cuts would come from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), which would face a more than 50% cut from $7.5 billion to just $3.9 billion. This division includes all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics, heliophysics, and biological and physical science research.
The draft budget request proposes a 68% cut to astrophysics (from $1.5 billion to $487 million), a more than 43% cut to heliophysics (from $805 million to $455 million), a 30% cut to planetary science (from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion), and a 53% cut to Earth science (from $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion).
The proposal retains funding for the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, but kills funding for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is fully assembled, on budget, and on schedule to launch in 2 years.
Also on the chopping block are the funding for the DAVINCI+ mission to Venus and the Mars Sample Return joint mission with the European Space Agency, which has been a budgetary flashpoint for years.
NASA’s Earth science division within SMD is home to NASA’s Earth observing satellite programs and climate research. Combined with continued attacks on NOAA and the National Weather Service, such steep budget cuts to NASA Earth science would nearly eliminate the United States’s capacity to study climate change and protect people from increasingly severe climate impacts.
The draft budget also appears to seek to force the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which employs more than 10,000 civil servants and contractors.
Resources
• Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA (Ars Technica)
• Massive cuts to NASA science proposed in early White House budget plan (Washington Post)
• Historical NASA Budget Data (Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society)
• Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
“NASA Goddard and the NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security,” wrote U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in a statement. Van Hollen is the Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies.
“This is a wholly unserious budget proposal,” Van Hollen noted. “I will fight tooth and nail against these cuts and to protect the critical work being done at NASA Goddard.”
On 9 April, Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said in his Senate hearing that he had no knowledge of any planned budget cuts to NASA and had no present intentions of cancelling existing programs. Notably, he did not commit to keeping all NASA field centers open given multiple chances to do so. Isaacman repeatedly emphasized that he was committed to ensuring U.S. dominance in the space race against China, which also seeks to put humans on the Moon and Mars, as well as expand its exploration science program throughout the solar system. These budget cuts would make that goal much harder to achieve.
The draft containing these proposed cuts, known as “passback” documents, were given to NASA officials on 10 April (though rumors of these cuts circulated in early March). NASA typically has 72 hours to review the documents and submit appeals with justifications, which are incorporated into the official President’s Budget Request. If adopted as is, this President’s Budget Request for NASA would be the lowest (adjusted for inflation) since 1961, before the start of the Apollo program.
“NASA Goddard and the NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security,” according to Van Hollen. “To gut NASA Goddard and the NASA Science Mission Directorate is not just shortsighted, it’s dangerous.”
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer
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