The White House has proposed slashing NASA’s budget by 24 percent, dropping it from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If approved, it would mark one of the agency’s deepest single-year cuts in federal support, and crash its inflation-adjusted funding to levels not seen in decades.
The cuts are just a recommendation at this point to Congress, not a done deal. NASA has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, notably from Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). Both are likely to fight hard against this downgrade, which would effectively give China the lead in space science and research.
Under the proposed spending overhaul [PDF] from the Office of Management and Budget this week – following days of speculation – NASA’s Moon-bound Artemis program will undergo a major shakeup, with the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule slated for retirement after Artemis III, the flagship mission to put American boots back on the lunar surface this decade.
The Lunar Gateway, originally envisioned as a small orbiting station to support Moon missions, would also be canceled, with some components potentially repurposed. In their place, the space agency is expected to lean on commercial alternatives for future lunar ambitions.
The draft budget will slash $2.3 billion from NASA’s science division, essentially cutting inquiry back to the bare minimum while the administration continues to claim the US can beat China to the Moon and eventually reach Mars. And speaking of the Red Planet, those Mars rock samples gathered by the Perseverance rover will stay put on the alien dust world for the foreseeable future, as the budget scraps the Mars Sample Return mission and punts its objectives to some future crewed expedition.
Closer to home, the International Space Station faces a $508 million cut, with reduced crew numbers and resupplies and a confirmed date of 2030 for its destruction. It will be replaced by commercial space stations, the budget statement says, and any research will be “focused on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs.”
The budget calls for the restructuring of NASA’s Landsat Next mission – a proposed trio of satellites intended to deliver high-resolution, multispectral imaging of Earth’s surface. Climate-focused “green aviation” programs are eliminated entirely, though work tied to air traffic control and defense is spared. Meanwhile, a raft of lower-priority science and tech projects face cancellation or indefinite delay if the proposed cuts get past Congress.
As well as the NASA slashing, the Trump White House pushed for reductions in public spending on health, education, and clean energy programs, but backed boosts for the military.
The consequences will come years down the line
“It’s a budget of retrenchment and retreat,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, told The Register of the proposed NASA changes.
“The consequences will come years down the line. It’s the things that we won’t know, the cancer treatments we won’t discover, the big insights into the cosmos that impact how we can manipulate our world around us, we won’t know. It’s fundamentally a budget of turning down and inwards.”
He pointed out the proposed budget cuts, adjusted for inflation, would leave the agency with about the levels of funding it had in the early 1960s, when the Mercury missions were still trying to get astronauts into orbit.
The most notable increase in support goes to human space exploration, which gets an extra $647 million in pursuit of landing humans back on the Moon, and eventually Mars for the first time. But with NASA’s in-house Artemis hardware proposed for retirement after just three missions, and deep cuts targeting the propulsion tech needed to reach the Red Planet, don’t hold your breath for any success, in this vulture’s opinion.
The budget document leans heavily on the commercial sector NASA nurtured and helped spawn – cough, SpaceX – to pick up the slack from the cuts; the agency will be kept clear of areas “better suited to private sector research and development.”
Although Elon Musk – the billionaire SpaceX supremo, DOGE head operative, and President Trump’s éminence grease – is ostensibly stepping back from guiding government, this draft budget is particularly good news for him, his rocket biz, and his long-held, under-delivered ambitions to send people to Mars. ®
