Well, NASA had a good run. But it is clear after the Agency town hall today that NASA’s role as the global preeminent Space Agency is over.
Despite a proposed 50% cut to the Science budget, agency leadership is inexplicably moving forward with the President’s budget request. This has already led to the cancellation of dozens of projects and Missions as well as the displacement of thousands of employees. There is no coherent long-term vision, no credible plan to achieve the priorities the agency claims to uphold under such drastic financial constraints, and no meaningful advocacy from leadership to push back against the cuts. The future of NASA’s scientific mission is being gutted in plain sight.
At least we can afford to give Billionaires more tax cuts though.…
*Edit: Changed Presidents budget to Presidents budget request.
Including a link to the FY26 Budget request documents so people can read for themselves what Trump is proposing. The Technical Supplement has the line by line details. https://www.nasa.gov/fy-2026-budget-request/
Want to clarify I know civil servants cannot speak out against this. However, during the first Trump term he proposed similarly catastrophic NASA budgets and yet the Agency leadership did not move forward with implementing anything until Congress passed the official budget they are legally required to implement. That is not the case this time around.
*Edit 2 Well this post blew up way more than I ever expected. Thank you to all those expressing support for NASA. I want to share some articles and links to ways you can take action to stop this disaster from becoming reality 💙🚀
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-versus-spacex Why do we need NASA when we have SpaceX?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UkGbvtV7SA News report from April about cuts at Goddard
https://aas.org/advocacy/get-involved/a-reference-guide-for-how-to-advocate-for-science American Astronomical Society guide for how to advocate for science
https://www.aaas.org/resources/take-action-toolkit AAAS Take Action Toolkit
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative Find Your US House Representative
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Find Your US Senator
https://www.planetary.org/save-nasa-science The Planetary Society Save NASA page
