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Months after Congress voted against the Trump administration’s brutal NASA budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, the White House has renewed its efforts to deal the space agency’s science directorate a devastating blow.
Earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its proposed 2027 top-line request, which would eviscerate NASA’s science budget by a whopping 47 percent and slash the agency’s overall funding by 23 percent. The move highlighted the Trump administration’s persistent and staunchly anti-science agenda, once again drawing outraged reactions from space advocacy groups.
Worse yet, as The Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier told Space.com, the latest document is incredibly vague, failing to identify which space science missions would land on the chopping block. It even refuses to list prior-year funding levels, a baffling departure from 60 years of institutional history.
“There are two things: the astonishing lack of transparency and the abject refusal to acknowledge political reality,” Dreier said. “This is the least transparent NASA budget request I’ve ever seen — and I’ve literally looked through every single one since 1960.”
Dreier also pointed out that the White House was allocating $438 million to “Mars Technology” without providing any further cost breakdowns.
The 2027 request also appears to largely ignore Congress’s insistence on keeping NASA well funded. Lawmakers resoundingly rejected the White House’s proposed 2026 budget, which Dreier described as an “extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States,” last year.
In other words, the Trump administration’s latest request comes off as a “copy-paste budget” from its last attempt, as Dreier told Space.com, calling it out as “sloppy and unprofessional.”
The document even includes egregious errors that could’ve easily been caught, with Dreier noting that it lists the Mars Sample Return mission as a line item even though it was canceled last year, and misstates the fiscal year for the funding of NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope.
While funding for future missions to the Moon including NASA’s signature Artemis program remains largely intact, space science — which relies on long-term public funding — could take a massive hit.
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