Will Federal Budget Cuts Affect Space Science?

Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget — the largest in the agency's history. The trims are largely aimed at the NASA's fundamental science research and would halt science that has already been partially paid for, like the Mars sample return and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Many scientists and policy experts are also worried that the reduced funding would cause a scientific brain drain. But within the last month, Congress has started to discuss appropriations packages that may not severely contract the budget after all. So, in this episode, Regina https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber reports on the important hypotheticals: What programs might be affected? Are these cuts likely to happen? If so, when? Want to hear more stories about space and policy? Let us know at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:20Emily Kwong?

  Hi, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here. The Trump administration has made many, many cuts to the federal government, and they're not done yet. The White House's Office of Management and Budget proposed a 24% cut to NASA funding in fiscal year 2026. My co-host, Regina Barber, has been looking into what's going on at NASA. Hey, Gina.

• 0:40Regina Barber?

  Hey, Em. OK, so first, we should say that these cuts are somewhat in line with the cuts to science and industry at other agencies like FEMA, HHS, et cetera. And we've covered all that in past episodes of Short Wave.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  NASA is not being singled out for cuts. It's part of the overall Trump administration movement to reduce this federal budget.

• 1:04Regina Barber?

  That's John Logsdon. He's a policy analyst and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council. With that said, when I first heard about this proposed budget, I really wanted to know which programs might get cut, what research might be impacted.

• 1:17Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Regina Barber?

  So in my hunt for answers, I reached out to Dara Norman. She's an astronomer and the president of the American Astronomical Society.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  I think this is unprecedented in the amount of cutting that NASA has ever seen.

• 1:30Emily Kwong?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:31Regina Barber?

  Yeah. I also spoke with the Assistant Director of Science Policy and Government Relations at the American Geophysical Union, and her name is Brittany Webster.

• 1:39Speaker 05

  We're really kind of going back to the start of NASA with some of these levels. Some of these cuts, I think, predate the dawn of the space age.

• 1:47Emily Kwong?

  OK. What are these cuts targeting?

• 1:49Regina Barber?

  Yeah. They're primarily aimed at NASA's fundamental science research. The science divisions that we're talking about are planetary science, astrophysics, heliophysics, that study in the Sun. They're all getting cut by about 50%.

• 2:03Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 2:03Regina Barber?

  But it's not all cuts. There's one division that will be getting more money, not less.

• 2:09Emily Kwong?

  Oh, what's that?

• 2:09Regina Barber?

  That's human spaceflight. And that's going to refocus on, quote, "beating China back to the moon and on putting the first human on Mars."

• 2:19Emily Kwong?

  OK, but the budget hasn't passed yet, right?

• 2:21Regina Barber?

  Yeah, things appear to be in the works, though. A couple of weeks ago, the White House sent out a bunch of memos basically asking NASA leaders to get ready to shut down specific programs. And I talked to Jack Corelli about it. He's an expert in space policy and advocacy, and he works at the Planetary Society.

• 2:37Speaker 06

  So the thing that leaked is this massive document and supplemental documents, letters to what are called principal investigators, which are the people in charge of of missions, saying, by middle of next week, you need to have written a termination plan.

• 2:53Regina Barber?

  And to be clear, these termination plans aren't finalized. Like, none of the programs have been shuttered yet. But people are, like, reading the writing on the wall. And policy experts like Jack are saying, hey, all of these NASA programs are on the chopping block, layoffs and cuts, they're coming.

• 3:08Emily Kwong?

  So NASA's preparing for these cuts before they actually happen. They may not happen. What is the long-term implication of this, Gina, to NASA and to space science?

• 3:17Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so experts are concerned that the US is going to lose its dominance in scientific research, that if these scientists start to leave after seeing these proposed cuts, they might not come back.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  I think the brain drain is really real. We've seen other countries literally put out calls, putting up money for American scientists to apply for if they want to move to their country and continue their research there.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Folks really are looking to find positions in Europe and in Canada and other places in order to actually stay in the field. And so we are really, really shooting ourselves in the foot as far as being leaders in this kind of science.

• 4:00Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, NASA budget cuts, what they mean for future missions.

• 4:04Regina Barber?

  And existing ones, some that Americans have already poured millions into. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 4:17Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

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• 5:19Emily Kwong?

  Gina, so before the proposed budget cuts were put out there, what was NASA's budget?

• 5:26Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so the most recent budget was a little under $25 billion. That's 0.3% of national spending. One way to think about it is if somebody were to like pay the government $100 in taxes, roughly 37 cents of that would be going to NASA. Now, the Trump administration wants the amount to decrease to more like 27 cents. And that lower amount, like I said earlier, is mostly going to human missions, which is in line with what President Trump has been promising. He talked about this during his second inaugural address.

• 5:55Speaker 08

  And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.

• 6:06Emily Kwong?

  Why do you think human missions are being left? Kind of financially intact.

• 6:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I asked Jack that same question, like, why cut all these programs but like, really focus on human spaceflight? Mm-hmm.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  It's the sexy topic, right? I mean, it hearkens back to that, like, pioneer spirit. The president invoked manifest destiny in his inauguration speech. These really old American ideals, right? But the human stuff is, you kind of can't have one without the other.

• 6:32Regina Barber?

  Because Emily, a lot of basic science and research needs to be investigated so that, like, later, humans can get into space. Here's Dara again. She's the astronomer and the president of the American Astronomical Society.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  In order to support human spaceflight, there are other technologies and areas and other science that you need to do to make sure that you understand the worlds that you're going to.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Just think about what it takes for you to live on Earth. You need a food source, you need water, you're going to need an energy source, you're going to need a habitat, potentially, you're going to need medical.

• 7:08Emily Kwong?

  So she's saying it takes a lot of science to get to Mars?

• 7:11Regina Barber?

  Yeah, that was Brittany from the American Geophysical Union again. She reminded me that the US has already spent money on sending robots to Mars to get more of this information.

• 7:21Emily Kwong?

  Oh, right. There's been like a whole series of Martian rovers with cool names. You could kind of follow what they were doing on Mars.

• 7:27Regina Barber?

  One had a very popular Twitter account. But yeah, on the surface of Mars right now, there's actually little pieces of Martian soil that one of the rovers has drilled, and those pieces of Martian soil are waiting to be collected. Those soil samples, on top of being able to tell scientists if there ever was life on Mars, like biosignatures, these samples could inform future human missions about potential hazards from like the Martian environment. And Brittany says that with these proposed cuts, scientists may never be able to analyze those samples, like, this mission might get canceled.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  I think the whole Mars infrastructure is really in question with the cuts. There's a lot of question marks in the budget regarding Mars and kind of the human-to-Mars pipeline, if you will. I think the future is really unclear.

• 8:15Regina Barber?

  Brittany says this new focus on human missions really doesn't take into account how much robotic missions have already done. They gather so much science efficiently with fewer resources and without putting humans in harm's way. But other policy experts like John say that the Martian sample mission was facing problems long before these cuts were even proposed.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Mars sample return was on life support well before Mr. Trump was elected. It's a mission, or at least an architecture of a mission that has all kinds of problems associated with it. So if something has to go, maybe that's it.

• 8:54Regina Barber?

  Hmm. What other programs have already started, but maybe on the chopping block? Yeah, there's a range. There are small ones that relate to like space weather, and then there's big ones focused on studying like our nearest neighbor Venus. Some climate satellites will be scrapped. Even the administration's like lunar ambitions would be scaled back significantly. So Artemis III, which is the first US lunar mission to put like humans back on the moon since Apollo, under this new budget, that would be the final funded mission in that Artemis series. A plan to build the first space station orbiting the moon, that would be canceled under these cuts. Okay, all this is to save money, presumably, does it? Yeah, so it does in the short term, but Brittany and Jack say.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  I don't think we're being a good steward of taxpayer dollars if there are missions that we've already gone through the trouble of launching their operational state in space. You know, how much money are we really saving by cutting off these missions when we're actually still getting science out of them?

• 9:56Regina Barber?

  Right, so the concern here is that all these missions and projects that have already been funded by taxpayer dollars may just stop. Yeah, and another really big project that's in jeopardy is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. That's a really significant project. I mean, that telescope has been.

• 10:13Emily Kwong?

  Under construction for like a decade and it was on its way to being capable of finding planets beyond our solar system.

• 10:19Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and hopefully figure out more about dark matter, dark energy, you know, what's making our universe accelerate and expand. This telescope would also maybe democratize a lot of space research by making huge amounts of data available to everyone all at once. I mean, unlike previous space telescopes.

• 10:39Emily Kwong?

  Right, like James Webb or Hubble. But you're saying that with these cuts, Nancy Roman, that project might just stop?

• 10:44Regina Barber?

  Yeah, yeah, some astronomers are worried that's going to happen. Dara, that's the president of the society we talked about, she's also an active astronomer and she uses these observatories for research.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  That mission in particular was really on budget and on track to be launched, I think, in two years. And funding has already been spent on it. And right now, the cuts are so steep that, you know, it'll be hard to finish that mission in a timely way.

• 11:16Emily Kwong?

  Right, it takes humans to ultimately make missions as cool as Nancy Roman or landing on Mars or the moon happen. How's the Trump administration justify these cuts?

• 11:28Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so the White House's OMB, that's the Office of Management and Budget, they put out a statement saying that these cuts are about streamlining NASA's workforce. And elsewhere, they've implied that some of these projects can be outsourced to private companies and NASA's job should be to focus on human spaceflight. And Emily, like I was telling you earlier, a lot of scientists feel that these are unprecedented cuts, but John sees things a little differently.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  One thing to say is that it was not written in stone anywhere that the United States should have a vigorous space science program. It's a product of history. This is an opportunity to ask a question, what priority should space science have compared to all the other demands on the federal budget? And the answer may not be as much as it has had for the past 40 years.

• 12:18Regina Barber?

  So I reached out to NASA and they replied that they're not commenting on any of the proposed budget questions. But in the past month or so, there has been movement elsewhere. Every living former head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate signed a letter urging Congress to reject these substantial cuts to NASA's science budget. The Senate Appropriations Committee met to discuss funding NASA at $24.9 billion, among other topics. And this would be just above the current enacted budget. And last week, the House put forward their, like, own version of this, and that would keep NASA's budget the same.

• 12:51Emily Kwong?

  OK.

• 12:52Regina Barber?

  But again, we need to keep in mind that scientists and policy experts told me that even though these new budgets, you know, sound great, they would probably still reallocate money away from space science and towards human spaceflight.

• 13:03Emily Kwong?

  Oh, OK. So these cuts may not hold? They may not happen?

• 13:06Regina Barber?

  No. So the 2026 budget hasn't been finalized. Congress spends most of the summer putting together the budget plans and then vote on it. So the earliest we'll see this vote is September, but most likely, it won't happen until, like, the end of the year.

• 13:21Emily Kwong?

  OK. So things are very much still in flux.

• 13:24Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Emily Kwong?

  It's no small thing to weed through budget documents. So Gina, thank you for bringing this to us.

• 13:29Regina Barber?

  Thank you, Em.

• 13:31Emily Kwong?

  Please like, follow, or subscribe to Short Wave now. You will get a fun and fresh science episode in your feed four times a week. And Short Wavers, we have an extra special gift for you. For our summer series, C-Camp, every Monday, you get new C-Camp episodes, but you can also get in your inbox every week a limited edition newsletter with comics, fun puzzles. Sign up at npr.org/ccamp. Thanks so much. Today's episode was produced by Hannah Chin and it was edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 14:10Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.