According to The Planetary Society, the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to NASA for fiscal year 2027 would effectively return the space agency to its 1961 funding level.
The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society is calling it “an extinction-level event for space science.”
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget proposed comparable cuts last year that were mostly ignored by the lawmakers ultimately in control of the purse strings. This time around, Dreier said, the spending plan was drafted to make the elimination of entire projects difficult to track.
“This is the least transparent NASA budget request I’ve ever seen, and I’ve literally looked through every single one since 1960,” he said. “This budget hides nearly every science mission termination. The only way to find if a project is proposed as cancelled is to compare the list of projects in the FY 2026 budget request to the list in FY 2027 and look for the omissions.”
Dreier added that every NASA budget since 1961 has included prior-year spending levels for each program, but OMB excluded that information this year, “making it impossible to assess if a proposed funding level is a decrease from the baseline.”
Fortunately, he said, the House appears poised to once again reject most of the administration’s cuts, though NASA’s science directorate could still face a 17% reduction in funding.
“We have not yet seen details released on how that would impact specific missions,” Dreier said. “We should know more details of their budget next week, after the full appropriations committee markup scheduled on May 13.”
On defense
Already, Arizona’s senior senator is pushing back on at least some of the proposed cuts.
Last month, Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut, signed onto a letter with three other Democratic senators calling on leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee to boost funding for Mars exploration, including at least $400 million for a planned mission to bring back samples from the planet’s surface.