This has been a good week for the US space agency in terms of the federal budget.
On Tuesday, a committee in the US House of Representatives passed a $24.8 billion budget bill for the coming fiscal year. Then, two days later a Senate committee passed a $24.9 billion budget for NASA. Both of these measures would keep funding more or less at the level of the current fiscal year and, for the most part, keep the space agency's programs going on their current trajectories.
These bills are not final. Both must move through the full House and Senate, and then be reconciled before going to President Trump for his signature. And time is running out, with fiscal year 2026 set to begin on October 1, just a little more than ten weeks from now.
"This is probably the most uncertain future NASA has faced, maybe since the end of Apollo," Casey Dreier tells me over the phone. Dreier is the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space.
On July 10, the Senate Appropriations Committee met to discuss the proposed federal Commerce, Justice and Science budget for 2026. While on average, funding for NASA has accounted for about 0.3 percent of total yearly spending by the federal government since the start of the 2010s, President Trump has called for a 24 percent cut year over year to the agency's operating allowance. By any metric, his plan would be devastating.
Adjusted for inflation, it would leave NASA with the smallest operating budget it has had since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel to space in 1961. In the process, it would eviscerate the agency's science budget by nearly half, resulting in the termination of 55 ongoing and or planned missions. It would also leave NASA with its smallest workforce in 70 years. All this, at a time when the agency has been tasked with returning to the Moon and bringing the first humans to Mars.
"There's no historical precedent to this level of single year, functionally indiscriminate and dramatic cuts. You lose, in one year, a third of all active science projects. [The Trump administration is] proposing to turn off missions that are performing not just good science, but unique and irreplaceable science. This isn't so they can reinvest the money in some radical new science efforts. No, the money is gone," said Dreier. "It's almost certainly the greatest threat to NASA science activities in the history of the space agency."
Dreier isn't exaggerating when he says some missions would be impossible to replace. One of the casualties of Trump's cuts would be the New Horizons probe. In 2015, New Horizons gave us our best look at Pluto ever. Four years later, it performed the farthest flyby in human history. As things stand, it's the only active spacecraft in the Kuiper belt, a region of our solar system that is not well-understood by scientists. Even if NASA were to start working on a replacement today, it would take a generation for that vehicle to reach where New Horizons is right now. It costs NASA about $14.7 million per year to continue operating the probe, a fraction of the $29.9 billion in additional funding Congress allocated to fund ICE enforcement and detainment operations in the president's recently passed tax bill.
Heather Roper
Another mission that would be impossible to replace is OSIRIS-APEX. If the name sounds familiar, it's because OSRIS-APEX is a continuation of NASA's incredibly successful OSRIS-REx flight. In 2020, the spacecraft visited 101955 Bennu, an ancient asteroid about the size of the Empire State Building, and collected a sample of regolith (rocks and dirt) from its surface using a never-before-tried technique.
After OSRIS-REx successfully returned the sample to Earth, NASA decided to extend the spacecraft's mission and fly to another asteroid, 99942 Apophis. In 2029, Apophis will pass about 19,600 miles from Earth. It will be the closest approach of any known asteroid of its size. NASA said the extension would add $200 million to a mission that had already cost it an estimated $1.16 billion.
"This project is a pennies on the dollar repurposing of an existing spacecraft. It's the only American spacecraft that will be at Apophis for a once in a generation opportunity to study an asteroid that will just barely miss us," said Dreier. "That seems important to know."
At a time when nearly every facet of American life is being upturned, the potential cancellation of dozens of NASA missions might seem a distant concern, but the gutting of the agency's science budget would have a ripple effect on communities across the US.
"NASA is an engine for jobs in the country, and for every NASA job, there are many more that are created in the private workforce," said Bethany Ehlmann, Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology. She also serves on the board of directors for The Planetary Society.
Professor Ehlmann's claim is supported by NASA's own data. In 2023, the agency employed 17,823 full-time civil servants nationwide. With NASA's private sector support factored in, that year the agency's missions were responsible for sustaining 304,803 jobs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Put another way, for every full-time equivalent job at a NASA facility, NASA supports at least 16 private sector jobs. "Space science has been broadly supported and impacts roughly three quarters of every congressional district in the country," said Dreier. "It's not just a red or blue state thing."
Following last week's Senate meeting, policymakers from both parties said they would push back on President Trump's NASA budget cuts. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies passed a funding bill that would provide NASA with a total budget of $24.8 billion for 2026, or the same amount it was allocated this year. The week before, the corresponding subcommittee in the Senate passed its own NASA funding bill.
The two versions differ on one critical detail. The Senate legislation maintains the agency's science budget at $7.3 billion, while the House version seeks to reduce it by 18 percent to $6 billion. Separately, the House is calling for a 23 percent cut to the National Science Foundation's budget. NSF funds much of the nation's astronomy research.
"What I'm hearing from lawmakers is that they understand how important NASA is to industry. They understand how important NASA is to universities in terms of training, and providing grants that train the next generation of the space workforce," said Professor Ehlmann, who was on Capitol Hill last week. The House and Senate will need to come to an agreement for the bill to move forward.
Even with many lawmakers in favor of maintaining NASA's budget, a flat budget is still a funding cut when accounting for inflation. Moreover, NASA has already been negatively affected by the Trump administration's efforts to trim the federal workforce.
According to reporting Politico published on July 9, 2,694 NASA employees have agreed to leave the agency through either early retirement, a buyout or a deferred resignation. Of those individuals, 2,145 are workers in senior positions and 1,818 are staff serving in missions areas like human spaceflight and science. "Once the workforce is gone, they're gone. You lose a ton of institutional knowledge," said Dreier. The employees who have agreed to leave represent about 15 percent of NASA's 2023 workforce of 17,823. With the July 25 deadline for early retirement, voluntary separation and deferred resignations quickly approaching, that number is likely to grow. NASA's shifting priorities under the Trump administration have also created uncertainty among the agency's contractors.
According to former NASA employee and NASA Watch creator Keith Cowing the workforce cuts are already affecting employees. "In the 40 years I've been involved with NASA in one way or another, I've never seen morale so bad," he said. "Is NASA bloated? Yeah, but the way you deal with bloat is to go in with a scalpel and you cut carefully. And yet you have people [like Elon Musk] standing on stage with chainsaws. That is not the way to run government, and it's certainly not the way to create the machinery needed to explore the universe."
Whatever happens next, Dreier worries there's the potential for there to be an erosion in public support for NASA. He points to a survey published by Pew Research. In 2023, the organization found that monitoring for asteroids that could hit Earth and tracking changes to the planet's climate were the two activities Americans wanted NASA to prioritize over other mandates. By contrast, sending human astronauts to the Moon and Mars were the least important priorities for the public.
REUTERS / Reuters
The House version of NASA's 2026 budget would boost the agency's exploration budget by 25 percent to $9.7 billion. In Trump's tax bill, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) included language that provided NASA with $4.1 billion for the fourth and fifth flights of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — the vehicle intended to carry the first NASA astronauts back to the Moon before before private sector alternatives like SpaceX's Starship are ready to fly.
With both the Trump administration and House pushing Moon and Mars missions as priorities, Dreier says they're "ironically doubling down on the activities that the private sector is already doing — SpaceX says it's going to send humans to Mars — and abandoning the things that only NASA does. There's no private sector company doing space science."
In effect, a NASA budget that sacrifices on scientific research in lieu of Mars missions would be one that invests in things the public says are the least important to it.
"I worry that they're moving away from what the public expects their space agency to do, and that as a consequence, it will undermine public investment in NASA," he said. "NASA is usually tied for the number one or two most popular federal agency. People wear NASA t-shirts. No one wears a Department of the Interior t-shirt walking out of the GAP. It's a rare and precious thing to have, and they're risking it. It's not just the future of the agency that's at risk, but the future of the public's relationship with it."
When asked for comment on this story, Bethany Stevens, NASA's press secretary, pointed Engadget to a letter from Acting Administrator Janet Petro NASA shared in a technical supplement it published alongside the president's budget request.
"We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. That means making strategic decisions — including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts not aligned with our Moon and Mars exploration priorities" Petro wrote.
The final NASA budget for 2026 is still months away from being finalized. After Tuesday's vote, the two funding bills will move to the full Senate and House appropriations committees for a vote and further revisions. Only after that will every member of each chamber get a chance to vote on the matter. Congress has until September 30 to complete the appropriations process before 2025 funding runs out. President Trump could also decide to veto the bill if it doesn't align with his priorities.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/trumps-defunding-of-nasa-would-be-catastrophic-153053020.html?src=rss
NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion crew capsule, lifts off from launch complex 39-B on the unmanned Artemis 1 mission to the moon, seen from Sebastian, Florida, U.S. November 16, 2022. REUTERS/Joe Rimkus Jr.
A budget-writing panel in the House of Representatives passed a $24.8 billion NASA budget bill Tuesday, joining a similar subcommittee in the Senate in maintaining the space agency's funding after the White House proposed a nearly 25 percent cut.
The budget bills making their way through the House and Senate don't specify funding levels for individual programs, but the topline numbers—$24.8 billion in the House version and $24.9 billion the Senate bill—represent welcome news for scientists, industry, and space enthusiasts bracing for severe cuts requested by the Trump administration.
The spending plan passed Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies covers NASA and numerous other federal agencies. The $24.8 billion budget the House seeks for NASA is $6 billion more than the Trump administration's budget proposal, and keeps NASA's funding next year the same as this year.
A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world—for a few weeks, Apophis will shine among the brightest objects in the night sky.
The near miss by the large Apophis asteroid in April 2029 offers NASA a golden—and exceedingly rare—opportunity to observe such an object like this up close. Critically, the interaction between Apophis and Earth's gravitational pull will offer scientists an unprecedented chance to study the interior of an asteroid.
This is fascinating for planetary science, but it also has serious implications for planetary defense. In the future, were such an asteroid on course to strike Earth, an effective plan to deflect it would depend on knowing what the interior looks like.
Negotiations over the US federal budget for fiscal year 2026 are in the beginning stages, but when it comes to space, the fault lines are already solidifying in the Senate.
The Trump White House released its budget request last Friday, and this included detailed information about its plans for NASA. On Thursday, just days later, the US Senate shot back with its own budget priorities for the space agency.
The US budget process is complicated and somewhat broken in recent years, as Congress has failed to pass a budget on time. So, we are probably at least several months away from seeing a final fiscal year 2026 budget from Congress. But we got our first glimpse of the Senate's thinking when the chair of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released his "legislative directives" for NASA on Thursday
WASHINGTON, DC—The general outline of the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget was released a few weeks back, and it included massive cuts for most agencies, including every one that funds scientific research. Late last week, those agencies began releasing details of what the cuts would mean for the actual projects and people they support. And the results are as bad as the initial budget had suggested: one-of-a-kind scientific experiment facilities and hardware retired, massive cuts in supported scientists, and entire areas of research halted.
And this comes in an environment where previously funded grants are being terminated, funding is being held up for ideological screening, and universities have been subjected to arbitrary funding freezes. Collectively, things are heading for damage to US science that will take decades to recover from. It's a radical break from the trajectory science had been on.
That's the environment that the US's National Academies of Science found itself in yesterday while hosting the State of the Science event in Washington, DC. It was an obvious opportunity for the nation's leading scientific organization to warn the nation of the consequences of the path that the current administration has been traveling. Instead, the event largely ignored the present to worry about a future that may never exist.
With the abrupt withdrawal of the US, the World Health Organization is grappling with a brutal funding shortfall, leaving the United Nations health agency to slash top leadership and run global programs on a budget similar to that of a local hospital system.
In remarks at a budget committee meeting Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus laid out the daunting budget numbers and announced a slimmed structure, cutting senior management from 14 to seven and the number of departments from 76 to 34.
"The loss of US funding, combined with reductions in official development assistance by some other countries, mean we are facing a salary gap for the next biennium of more than US$ 500 million," Tedros said.
NASA is considering scaling back its activities on the International Space Station, according to multiple sources. The changes, which are being considered primarily due to shortfalls in the space station budget, include:
Reducing the size of the crew complement of Crew Dragon missions from four to three, starting with Crew-12 in February 2026
Extending the duration of space station missions from six to eight months
The changes align with a desire that was reflected in the Trump administration's "skinny budget" proposal for NASA, released last Friday, which seeks to have the US space agency reduce its activities on the ISS.
"The Budget reduces the space station’s crew size and onboard research, preparing for a safe decommissioning of the station by 2030 and replacement by commercial space stations," stated the budget request for fiscal year 2026. "Crew and cargo flights to the station would be significantly reduced. The station’s reduced research capacity would be focused on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs."
I grab a circular on my way into Aldi to see what's on sale.
Joe Opaleski
One of the first things we do when we walk into Aldi is grab the weekly circular, which is usually stationed on a rack right by the main entrance.
The ads showcase Aldi's current deals, so it's a great guide for anyone looking to save. Oftentimes, we deliberately plan our meals around which items are on sale.
When we focus on discounted items, we also get less sidetracked by flashy deals on products we didn't intend to buy.
We avoid Aldi's premade meals and heat-and-eat dinners.
Aldi's ready-made food is tempting, but it can get pricey.
Alex Bitter/BI
We try to avoid premade meals, heat-and-eat dinners, and specialty deli items like dips and cheeses.
Although convenient, they tend to be significantly more expensive per serving than cooking something from scratch. Instead, we stick to buying staple ingredients, like fresh produce, canned beans, tortillas, and chicken.
By focusing on these core items, we've created a weekly meal plan that's cost-effective and healthy for our lifestyle.
Although the Aldi Finds are tempting, we also try to avoid them.
Aldi has a special aisle for its weekly and monthly deals on home goods and other special items.
Joe Opaleski
The Aldi Finds aisle features unique items, seasonal treats, and specialty goods that aren't part of the store's regular inventory.
The signage might make shoppers feel like they're getting some sort of deal, but this aisle can be a trap for impulse buys.
Sometimes, we find hidden gems here, but Aldi Finds are usually not essential to our weekly shopping list. Looking through them can just lead to us spending more money.
We usually skip this aisle entirely so we're not tempted.
An empty produce box helps us carry our groceries for free.
Aldi doesn't give out free shopping bags.
Joe Opaleski
Aldi has a bring-your-own-bag policy, so bags are not free at the register. Instead of buying them, we usually grab a large, empty produce box from the shelves.
Most Aldi stores have a section where you can find these boxes in a bin with recyclables, so it's pretty easy.
You can also just bring your own reusable bags, but we've found that the box is an even better solution for us.
It's much easier to pop one box in the trunk of our car and carry it into the house in a single trip. Once we're home, we reuse the box for storage or recycle it.
We stick to the perimeter of the store.
Most of the core ingredients we need are located along the perimeter of the store.
Joe Opaleski
Shopping around the store's perimeter helps us stick to our budget.
In most Aldi locations, more basic essentials, like produce, dairy, and meats, are located around the outer edges of the store.
In contrast, the center aisles usually have Aldi Finds, holiday items, household goods, snacks, and other products that are more likely to encourage impulse purchases.
When we shop, we literally snake our way around the perimeter, only detouring into the aisles when we need something on our list. It keeps our shopping trip efficient and minimizes our exposure to nonessential items.
This story was originally published on December 12, 2024, and most recently updated on April 28, 2025.
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