The White House wants to slash NASA’s budget and workforce and cancel a number of high-profile missions next year, newly released documents reveal.
On May 2, the Trump administration released its 2026 “skinny budget” request, a broad summary of its funding plans for the coming fiscal year. That document proposed cutting NASA funding by nearly 25%, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, with much of the reduction coming from the agency’s science programs.
On Friday afternoon (May 31), the White House published a more detailed version of the 2026 budget request, which shone more light on the administration’s aims and the potential effects on NASA, its people and its mission portfolio.
The proposed budget top line is the same in the newly released documents, which you can find here: NASA is allocated $18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026, which runs from Oct. 1, 2025 through Sept. 30, 2026.
This would be the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history, and the 2026 funding would be the agency’s lowest since 1961 when adjusted for inflation, according to The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration advocacy organization.
NASA science funding would be cut by 47% next year, to $3.9 billion — the same number provided by the skinny budget.
This would result in the cancellation of a number of high-profile missions and campaigns, according to the new documents. For example, Mars Sample Return — a project to haul home Red Planet material already collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover — would get the axe. So would the New Horizons mission, which is exploring the outer solar system after acing its Pluto flyby in July 2015, and Juno, a probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
Two orbiters that have been studying Mars for years — Mars Odyssey and MAVEN — would be cancelled, as would NASA’s cooperation on Rosalind Franklin, a life-hunting rover that the European Space Agency plans to launch toward the Red Planet in 2028.
“In total, this budget aims to cancel 41 science projects — fully a third of NASA’s science portfolio,” The Planetary Society said in a statement about the newly released budget documents. “These are unique projects that would require billions of new spending to replace.”
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s highly anticipated next-gen observatory, is not one of the casualties, as many had feared. But the budget request allocates just $156.6 million to Roman’s development next year — less than half of what NASA had planned to spend.
The budget request also slashes NASA’s workforce from its current 17,391 to 11,853 — a reduction of about 32%. And it would eliminate the agency’s Office of STEM Engagement, saying that NASA will inspire future generations sufficiently via its missions.
“The radical and rapid gutting of NASA’s resources will lead to reduced productivity, threaten institutional knowledge and create economic uncertainty in the American industrial base,” The Planetary Society said.
The organization is not a fan of the White House’s plan, describing it as “an extinction-level event for the space agency’s most productive, successful and broadly supported activity: science.”
The newly published documents also confirm other exploration plans laid out in the skinny budget — for example, the cancellation of the Gateway moon-orbiting space station and the phaseout of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule.
These pieces of hardware have long been part of NASA’s architecture for Artemis, its program of crewed moon exploration. The 2026 budget request eliminates SLS and Orion after they fly together on Artemis 3, a crewed landing mission targeted to launch in 2027.
They would be replaced by private vehicles developed via the new “Commercial Moon to Mars (M2M) Infrastructure and Transportation Program,” which gets $864 million in the 2026 budget proposal.
It’s unclear how much of this will actually come to pass, however; the budget request is just a proposal, which will not be enacted unless and until Congress approves it.
The Planetary Society, for one, doesn’t think this will happen; it describes the budget request “as dead on arrival in Congress.”
