Months after Congress voted against the Trump administration’s brutal NASA budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, the White House has renewed its efforts to deal a devastating blow to the space agency’s science directorate.
Earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its proposed 2027 top-line request, which would cut NASA’s science budget by 47 percent and reduce the agency’s overall funding by 23 percent. The move highlighted the Trump administration’s continued and staunchly anti-science agenda, once again drawing angry responses from space advocacy groups.
Worse, said Casey Dreyer, Planetary Society head of space policy Space.comThe latest document is incredibly vague, failing to identify which space science missions will land on the chopping block. It also refuses to list previous years’ funding levels, a startling departure from the institution’s 60-year history.
“There are two things: a stunning lack of transparency and a refusal to accept political reality,” Dreyer said. “This is the least transparent NASA budget request I’ve ever seen — and I’ve looked at literally every single one since the 1960s.”
Dreyer also pointed out that the White House allocated $438 million to “Mars technology” without providing any further cost breakdown.
The 2027 request appears to largely ignore Congressional urges to keep NASA well-funded. Lawmakers strongly rejected the White House’s proposed 2026 budget, which Dreyer described last year as “an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States.”
In other words, the Trump administration’s latest request comes as a “copy-paste budget” from the last effort, as Dreyer put it. Space.comCalling it “sloppy and unprofessional”.
The document also contains serious errors that could easily be caught, Dreyer noted, noting that it lists the Mars sample return mission as a line item even though it was canceled last year, and misstates the fiscal year for funding for NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope.
While funding for future missions to the Moon, including NASA’s signature Artemis program, remains largely intact, space science — which relies on long-term public funding — could take a big hit.
“That’s the essence of why we invest publicly in basic science,” Dreyer said Space.com. “Just because SpaceX is very good and launching rockets doesn’t mean it’s easy to get high-quality science data on Mars anymore.”
“The two activities are very different, but they often go together,” he added.
Despite the document’s flaws and ambiguities, NASA leadership is firmly behind the Trump administration’s efforts to largely dismantle the agency’s science mission. Administrator Jared Isaacman spoke in favor of the 2027 budget proposal CBS News that the agency would still have enough resources to “get to the moon.”
He also said CNN In a separate interview, “NASA’s science budget is larger than any other space agency in the world.”
“I strongly support the President’s fiscal policies and mandate to increase efficiency,” Isaacman wrote in an April 3 memo to NASA employees. SpaceNews.
NASA’s fate is once again in the hands of lawmakers. Given how its 2026 proposal fared, there’s a good chance the bipartisan group in Congress will once again reject the White House’s request.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) argued in a statement this week that it would be a “mistake” to gut funding for science missions.
“I’m going to try to lead the subcommittee and the whole committee where we’re funding NASA, NOAA and our other agencies like we did last year,” he said.
However, the upcoming midterm elections could soon complicate matters further, delaying an almost guaranteed amendment.
In short, OMB’s latest budget request appears to be little more than a clumsily constructed document designed to disrupt, not support, NASA’s operations, underscoring the White House’s apparent disregard for anything unrelated to sending astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
“Members of both parties recognize that dismantling the US space science program is a short-sighted, wasteful, strategic mistake,” Dreyer said. Space.com.
More on NASA’s budget: The White House is still trying to cut NASA’s budget
