White House budget proposal to gut NASA’s science programs

President Donald Trump’s proposed annual budget for NASA next year would nearly cut in half the agency’s science funding, while potentially cutting off money for other major initiatives like returning soil from Mars and a new space telescope, according to people familiar with the numbers.

The proposal was sent to officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Thursday as part of a back and forth process between federal agencies and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to solidify Trump’s budget request for 2026. The numbers and allocations could change as that process continues.

NASA received the budget request just a day after Trump’s pick to run the agency, billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX mission investor Jared Isaacman, argued that NASA should be able to send people to the moon and Mars in parallel programs. He said Trump is looking to usher in a golden age of science and discovery.

“I’m passionate about science and love nothing more than continue to see NASA go out and try and unlock the secrets of the universe,” Isaacman told US senators during his confirmation hearing in Washington.

The budget would provide roughly $3.9 billion for NASA’s entire science directorate, down from the $7.3 billion that was enacted for the department in fiscal year 2024, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is confidential. 

Within the science department, the budget request proposes a more than 50% cut to NASA’s Earth science missions and a nearly 70% cut to the agency’s astrophysics department, according to a document seen by Bloomberg and compared to the 2024 enacted budget. Other departments within science would all receive substantial cuts, the people said. 

A NASA spokesperson said the agency received the fiscal year 2026 budget passback and has begun the deliberative process, but would not confirm specific numbers.

According to the document, the proposed budget request would continue funding for NASA’s Hubble and James Webb telescopes, both of which are in space and operating.

However, the document says it would not assume funding for other telescopes, which suggests a cancellation of the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — a new powerful observatory designed to study the development of galaxies, stars and distant planets. 

The Roman Space Telescope has been expected to launch by May of 2027 with a lifetime budget of $4.3 billion, but the telescope is assembled and undergoing testing at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and could launch as early as the fall of 2026.

The proposed budget request also doesn’t provide explicit funding for NASA’s Mars Sample Return initiative, the people said. The first leg of that program began with the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been batching samples of Martian dirt since landing on the Red Planet in February 2021.

However, in 2024, NASA acknowledged that the cost of development of the rest of the hardware needed to retrieve those samples was ballooning over budget and facing extensive delays. To fix the issue, the agency put out a call to the commercial space industry and other institutions to come up with proposals for how to do the program more efficiently. NASA announced in January that it planned to select the final path forward in the second half of 2026.

The budget request also includes major cuts to NASA’s planetary science division and heliophysics division, which could lead to cancellations of programs already in development or currently in space.

Now that NASA has received this initial proposed budget request, the agency will provide feedback on these intended changes to the White House OMB before a finalized version of the budget request is released later this year. However, it will ultimately be up to Congress to approve of the proposed changes for the final 2026 year budget.

The budget numbers were first reported by Ars Technica and the Washington Post.