The White House Is Still Desperately Trying to Slash NASA’s Budget

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Last year, the Trump administration made efforts to deal NASA a devastating blow by making brutal cuts to its budget for the agency’s fiscal year 2026, something that would’ve wiped out thousands of jobs and place dozens of groundbreaking space missions on the chopping block.

Fortunately, the “extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States,” as Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier described it at the time, never came. Following months of deliberations, Congress passed a $24.4 billion budget for the agency in January — three months after the start of the agency’s fiscal year — that kept its existing budget largely intact.

Now, a mere two days following the launch of NASA’s historic Artemis 2 mission, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released its proposed 2027 budget for the agency, showing the Trump administration isn’t giving up on gutting many of the agency’s operations. According to a newly-released outline for its proposed government budget, the OMB wants to slash NASA’s budget by 23 percent compared to its recently enacted 2026 budget.

While that may not sound as steep as last year’s proposal, the agency’s science directorate would still be eviscerated, with its budget reduced by 47 percent, as SpaceNews points out.

The document doesn’t single out any specific science missions, but the OMB said it’s looking to cut a whopping 40 missions. As Bloomberg reports, that could make it incredibly unpopular on Capitol Hill.

Space advocacy groups are equally taken aback.

“The Planetary Society is deeply disappointed by this budget proposal,” the Planetary Society wrote in a statement.

“The White House’s budgeting office has put forward the same budget cuts to NASA and NASA science that were rejected by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress last year,” the statement reads. “This proposal needlessly resurrects an existential threat to US leadership in space science and exploration.”

“The American public responded in record numbers to last year’s proposed cuts to space science, and we believe they will do so again,” wrote the NGO, which was founded in 1980 by beloved planetary scientist Carl Sagan.

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