This week, as Part of the process to develop a budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the White House Trump shared a draft copy of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.
This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for a total reduction of approximately 20 percent to the agency’s budget in all fields, which is actually $ 5 billion in the total total line of about $ 25 billion. However, the majority of discounts are concentrated in the Agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all the science of planets, Earth sciences, astronomical physics research, and more.
According to the “Corridor malfunction” documents granted to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs will receive approximately 50 percent of the financing. After the agency received $ 7.5 billion in science in the fiscal year 2025, the Trump administration proposed a scientific budget for science with a value of only $ 3.9 billion for the next fiscal year.
Detail of discounts
Among the proposals reduced by two -thirds of astronomical physics, (to 487 million dollars), larger than two -thirds of the discounts to hallophone (a decrease to 455 million dollars), the reduction of more than 50 percent for Earth Sciences (to $ 1.033 billion), and 30 percent of planetary science (less to 1.929 billion billion).
Although the budget will continue to support continuous tasks such as the Hubble Space and James Webb Space Telescope, it will kill the long -awaited Nancy Grace Roman, a observatory that appears to be equal with these two global -level tools that have already been completely assembled and the budget to start two years ago.
“The passage of vehicles supports a continuous operation of Hubble telescopes and a spacecraft for space, and it is assumed that there is no funding that is provided for other telescopes,” the document said.
Other important discounts include ending the financing of the return of the Mars sample as well as the Da Vinci mission to Venus. The budget cuts also seem to be forced by the Godard Space Center in Maryland, as the agency includes 10,000 civilian and contracting employees.
Malfunction
The discounts are in line with what Ars Technica was reported exclusively last monthThe Trump administration was studying a 50 percent huge reduction for NASA science programs. Publicly, some of those responsible for these concerns reduced. Recently, this week, Acting Director of NASA, Janet Petro, These reports were described As “rumors from really unreliable sources.”
However, science policy experts were more anxious, describing such discounts as a “level of extinction” occurred for what was seen as the crown jewel in the Space Agency. Almost all NASA’s accomplishments have been delivered over the past 25 years by science programs, including exploits such as the ingenuity helicopter, which is flying on Mars, the new prospects invalidate Pluto, and the discovery of Cassini for water on the Encladus.
This corridor document is only the opening of the operation to create a federal budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which starts on October 1 of this year. The budget is produced by the White House management and budget office, which is supervised by Russell Fion, who has a long The clearest priorities of the science control budget Through its center for renewing America.
The Trump administration candidate for NASA leadership, private astronaut Jared Ishaq, said during a This week’s confirmation session He strongly supported NASA science programs. Isacman is unlikely to participate in the drafting of this document, because the US Senate has yet to confirm. The candidates are usually excluded from the policy before confirmation.