Trump Proposes Historic Budget Cuts To NASA And National Science Foundation
Written by on 4 Ιουνίου 2025
In a controversial proposal for the 2026 federal budget, former President Donald Trump has outlined sweeping funding cuts to major scientific institutions, including a 56% reduction to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and nearly 25% slashed from NASA’s budget — the largest reduction in the agency’s history.
According to documents released by the White House, NASA’s budget would shrink to $18.8 billion, down from over $25 billion, with science programs taking the hardest hit — their funding nearly halved to $3.9 billion. NASA’s workforce would also be reduced by 32%, down to fewer than 12,000 employees.
Among the cancelled space missions:
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- Juno, orbiting Jupiter since 2016
- New Horizons, which famously flew past Pluto in 2015
- OSIRIS-REx, which brought asteroid samples to Earth and was set to visit Apophis
- Mars orbiters Odyssey and MAVEN
- The DaVinci mission to Venus
- The nearly completed Gateway lunar station
Programs studying climate change are especially impacted. Satellites Terra, Aqua, and Aura, crucial to Earth’s atmospheric monitoring for over 20 years, will be decommissioned. CO₂-mapping missions OCO and the billion-dollar AOS cloud-climate initiative also face termination.
The NSF’s funding would drop from $9B to $3.9B, effectively shutting down one of the two LIGO labs — the very observatories that proved Einstein’s gravitational wave theory and won the 2017 Nobel Prize.
“This is a catastrophic mistake,” said planetary scientist Alan Stern, former head of NASA’s science division. “We’re gutting the future of science and space.”
The plan now awaits Congressional approval, though similar proposals from past administrations have often faced bipartisan resistance.
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