White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

In many ways, NASA’s science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini’s discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA’s science directorate.

Of NASA’s roughly $25 billion budget, however, only about 30 percent is allocated to science. For fiscal year 2024, this amounted to $7.4 billion. This spending was broken down into approximately $2.7 billion for planetary science, $2.2 billion for Earth science, $1.5 billion for astrophysics, and $800 million for heliophysics.

The proposed cuts are being driven by Russell Vought, the recently confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, which sets budget and policy priorities for a presidential administration. In some sense, the budgetary decisions should not come as a surprise, as they are consistent with what Vought proposed in a “shadow” budget for fiscal-year 2023 as part of his Center for Renewing America.

“The budget also proposes a 50 percent reduction in NASA Science programs and spending, reducing their misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs,” Vought’s organization wrote in its report published in December 2022.

Zeroing out Earth science?

Despite Vought’s desire, however, NASA is expressly charged with studying our planet.

The congressional act that created NASA in 1958 calls for the space agency to expand human knowledge about Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the agency’s Earth observation satellites have substantially increased our understanding of this planet’s weather, changing climate, and land use.

Even if NASA’s Earth science budget were taken to zero, cutting the overall science budget in half would still dramatically reduce funding in planetary science as well as other research areas. Scientists told Ars that NASA would be forced to make difficult decisions, likely including shutting off extended missions such as the Voyager and Curiosity probes on Mars, and possibly even the Hubble Space Telescope. It might be possible to save missions in later stages of development, such as the Dragonfly probe to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the NEO Surveyor mission to search for hazardous asteroids. But it would be impossible to start meaningful new missions to explore the Solar System, potentially setting back planetary exploration a decade.