NASA’s budget is still an unfathomable mess. The government shutdown late last year once again delayed proceedings to determine the space agency’s future — but if it were up to the Trump administration, NASA’s science budget would be slashed in half, an “extinction-level” inflection point for US space exploration and science.
If Congress were to have its druthers, on the other hand, NASA’s budget would largely remain unchanged, securing the future of dozens of important missions — both ongoing and planned — that the White House is looking to place on the chopping block.
Trapped between the two, the fate of the space agency remains in the air. Congress passed a short-term resolution on November 12 that left the government until January 31 to ratify NASA’s budget. NASA’s recently sworn-in administrator and former SpaceX space tourist, Jared Isaacman, has yet to officially comment on the matter, though he’s made it clear that he’s aligned with the Trump administration’s tripling down on private industry-led space exploration.
As uncertainty and confusion prevail, though, the Trump administration has taken it upon itself to gut entire buildings at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC), which played a key role in the development of its groundbreaking James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, alongside countless other key missions.
This week, news emerged that the Trump administration is even shutting down the center’s library — NASA’s largest — and threatening to destroy an undetermined number of books, documents, and journals in the process.
As the New York Times reports, many of these invaluable artifacts haven’t been digitized or made available elsewhere. While a NASA spokesperson told the newspaper that the agency will review what to keep and what to throw away over the next 60 days, it’s a sobering glimpse at a federal agency in crisis.
After the NYT story ran, the agency’s freshly-minted administrator Jared Isaacman pushed back against its claims.
“The [NYT] story does not fully reflect the context NASA shared,” he wrote on X. “At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines.”
That claim seems to contradict the NYT, which reported that a NASA spokesman named Jacob Richmond had told it that the agency would “review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.”
NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens, meanwhile, described the initiative as a “consolidation, not a closure,” saying the Trump administration is looking to close 13 buildings and more than 100 labs across the GSFC campus by March.
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