One of president Donald Trump's long-held desires has been to replace NASA with private spaceflight enterprises. With cronies in charge at the agency to execute draconian budget cuts to that end, it looks like the president is about to get his wish.
As Aviation Week reports, the agency is gearing up to be gutted as its leadership prepares to enact the Trump administration's outrageous budget reductions, which include thousands of layoffs and nearly 50 percent lobbed off its science budget, which will result in the cancellation of dozens of important missions.
"Right now we are planning to the limits — or the resources — that were set for us in the president’s budget," explained Nicola Fox, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate, per AW.
As Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger suggested in a post on X, there are still about six weeks left for the fair-minded members on both sides of the aisle in Congress to save NASA and pass their own 2026 budget — one that doesn't involve selling NASA for parts and abandoning the 67 years old hard work put into it by dedicated Americans who wanted to reach the stars.
In the seven-and-a-half months since Trump took office for the second time, threats of such hefty budget cuts — 25 percent overall, as decreed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in its "skinny" budget for the government writ large — have loomed large over NASA. According to the Los Angeles Times, NASA had almost no say in the proposed reductions.
Though the 2026 fiscal year budget will not go through until October 1 — pending Congressional approval — the Trump administration has wasted no time ramming through its disastrous agenda.
From the likely-illegal planned termination of two satellite-based missions that investigate climate change to the intentional removal of all mentions of women in leadership from NASA websites, Trump has already changed the face of the space agency for the worse.
If you hear it from John Grunsfeld, a former NASA astronaut who was the associate administrator of the agency's science directorate from 2012 until 2016, there may be a chilling reason for all these massive changes.
"You know, I can only speculate that this is part of a deliberate attempt to dumb down America," Grunsfeld told Scientific American last month. "People who are poorly educated are much more easily manipulated than people who have strong critical-thinking skills."
There's a glimmer of hope for the agency, as there's considerable momentum in Congress to oppose Trump's budget. A proposed budget by the Senate's appropriations committee would set the space agency's 2026 budget at $24.9 billion, roughly in line with this year's budget. However, the current status of the counterproposal remains unclear at the time of writing.
The stakes for NASA are enormous. The agency's science directorate is staring down the barrel, to experts, a potential "extinction-level event."
If Congress does not act in time, Berger noted, Trump and OMB's skinny budget will "almost certainly" happen — and it will be "very bad for NASA's science programs," indeed.
More on NASA's predicament: NASA Announces It Will Be Randomly Searching Employees