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We watched in awe as four NASA astronauts crammed inside a small spacecraft traveled around the far side of the Moon before starting their five-day return journey this week, delivering spectacular images of the “blue marble” we call our home and our closest celestial neighbor’s cragged surface.
The images perfectly highlighted the frailty of our existence: a tiny sliver of an atmosphere trapping a perfectly composited mixture of gases that allows life to flourish, making us possibly unique in the universe (at least as far as we know.)
And yet, despite an undeniable and worsening climate crisis, the Trump administration has turned a blind eye to environmental regulations and research, forcing out thousands of scientists and systematically dismantling atmospheric research institutions, as former NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies research scientist Kate Marvel detailed in a scorching new guest essay published by the New York Times.
In her essay, Marvel argued that the astronauts’ “pictures remind us that Earth has changed immensely since the last time astronauts went near the Moon in 1972.”
“So has NASA,” she added. “Budget cuts, chaos, and political interference now threaten the very science that motivates and enables space exploration.”
A 2025 report by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation concluded that the agency had been prematurely and illegally acting on Trump’s highly controversial 2026 budget proposal for the space agency, well before Congress had a chance to sign off — which it never did.
In January, lawmakers decided NASA’s budget would remain largely unchanged. Nonetheless, as budget cuts loomed and climate change denial surged, over 10,000 doctoral-trained experts in science left their jobs last year as part of an interagency, nationwide brain drain.
Little has changed since then. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its proposed 2027 budget for NASA last week, two days after the agency’s Artemis 2 mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center, renewing its efforts to eviscerate its science directorate by proposing a reduction of its budget totaling a whopping 47 percent. The proposal appalled the science community and lawmakers.
Marvel says she has experienced the Trump administration’s “attacks” on science first hand. Two weeks ago she left the agency, writing in a resignation letter that she wanted to “tell the truth” and “speak publicly about everything I learn.”
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