On July 10, the Senate Appropriations Committee met to discuss the proposed federal budget for Commerce, Justice, and Science for 2026. While NASA funding has averaged about 0.3 percent of total annual federal government spending since the early 2010s, President Trump has called for a 24 percent annual cut in the agency’s operating appropriations. By any measure, his plan would be devastating.
When adjusted for inflation, it would leave NASA with the smallest operating budget it has had since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly into space in 1961. At the same time, the agency’s science budget will be cut by almost half, leading to the termination of 55 ongoing and/or planned missions. This will also leave NASA with the smallest number of employees in 70 years. And this is at a time when the agency is tasked with returning to the moon and delivering the first humans to Mars.
“There is no historical precedent for such a level of one-year, functionally indiscriminate and dramatic cuts. In one year, you lose a third of all active science projects. [The Trump administration is] proposing to close missions that do not just good science, but unique and irreplaceable science. This is not so they can reinvest the money in some radical new scientific effort. No, the money is gone,” Dreier said. “It’s almost certainly the biggest threat to NASA’s science activities in the history of the space agency.”
Dreyer is not exaggerating when he says that some missions will be impossible to replace. One of the victims of Trump’s cuts will be the New Horizons probe. In 2015, New Horizons gave us the best view of Pluto ever. Four years later, it made the farthest flyby of Pluto in human history. It is currently the only operational spacecraft in the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that is poorly understood by scientists. Even if NASA started working on its replacement today, it would take a generation for this spacecraft to reach the level at which New Horizons is now. Continuing to operate the probe costs NASA about $14.7 million a year, which is only a fraction of the $29.9 billion in additional funding that Congress allocated to fund ICE enforcement and detention operations in the president’s recently passed tax bill.
Another mission that cannot be replaced is OSIRIS-APEX. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because OSRIS-APEX is a continuation of the incredibly successful OSRIS-REx mission. In 2020, the spacecraft visited 101955 Bennu, an ancient asteroid the size of the Empire State Building, and collected a sample of regolith (rocks and dirt) from its surface using a technique never before tested.
At a time when nearly every aspect of American life is being upended, the potential cancellation of dozens of NASA missions may seem like a distant concern, but cuts to the agency’s science budget will have a ripple effect on communities across the United States.
Even if many lawmakers are in favor of maintaining NASA’s budget, a flat budget still means funding cuts that are not adjusted for inflation. Moreover, NASA has already been negatively impacted by the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce.
The House version of the 2026 NASA budget proposed by the House of Representatives would increase the agency’s research budget by 25 percent to $9.7 billion. Senator Ted Cruz (R-S.C.) included language in Trump’s tax bill that would provide NASA with $4.1 billion for the fourth and fifth flights of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, a vehicle designed to take NASA’s first astronauts to the moon before private sector alternatives such as SpaceX’s Starship are ready to fly.
In essence, a NASA budget that sacrifices scientific research in lieu of Mars missions would be a budget that invests in the things that the public thinks are least important to it.
The final approval of NASA’s 2026 budget is still several months away. After Tuesday’s vote, the two funding bills will move to the Senate and House Appropriations Committees for a vote and further revision. Only then will each member of each chamber have the opportunity to vote on the issue. Congress has until September 30 to complete the appropriations process before funding runs out through 2025. President Trump can also veto the bill if it does not meet his priorities.
