President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA’s budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years.
The spending proposal for fiscal year 2027 is the opening salvo in a multi-month budget process. Both houses of Congress must pass their own appropriations bills, reconcile any differences between the two, and then send the final budget to the White House for President Trump’s signature. Fiscal year 2027 begins on October 1.
The White House requested a similar cut to NASA last year. The Republican-led Congress resoundingly rejected the proposal and kept NASA’s budget close to its level in the final year of the Biden administration. Like last year’s budget, the proposal from the Trump administration will undergo major changes as Congress weighs in over the coming months.
In a document explaining the NASA cuts, the Trump administration said it seeks to slash funding for “unnecessary and overpriced activities.” Under the White House plan, NASA will focus on the administration’s priority of landing humans on the Moon before the end of Trump’s term in office, then building a Moon base.
“The budget requests $18.8 billion in discretionary budget authority for NASA for 2027, a $5.6 billion or 23 percent decrease from the 2026 enacted level,” White House officials wrote in the budget outline.
All Moon and little else
The requested cuts will put NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who last week unveiled an ambitious vision for the space agency, in the position of publicly defending the Trump administration’s budget proposal. In a statement accompanying the budget, Isaacman wrote the proposal emphasizes “sustaining American leadership in deep space exploration, strengthening the nation’s industrial base, and accelerating technological innovations that benefit the American people.”
NASA’s Artemis program would receive $8.5 billion in 2027, with money directed toward commercial lunar landers, spacesuits, lunar rovers and habitats, and transportation systems to ferry astronauts to and from the Moon. The administration also requests new funding to ramp up the cadence of commercial robotic landers heading to the lunar surface. But this spending will come at the expense of other NASA programs.
“Consistent with the president’s commitment to fiscal discipline, NASA is pursuing a focused and right-sized portfolio that advances scientific discovery while ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources,” Isaacman wrote.
The most severe cuts are aimed at NASA’s science programs. The Trump administration proposes reducing science funding by nearly half, a $3.4 billion reduction compared to fiscal year 2026. The budget would cancel more than 40 “low-priority missions.” The budget overview released by the White House on Friday does not identify which missions would be terminated, other than Mars Sample Return, which was already effectively canceled last year due to cost overruns.
The White House asked for a cut to NASA’s science budget of a similar magnitude for fiscal year 2026, but Congress balked.
The Planetary Society decried the cuts as “draconian” in a press release on Friday.
“The White House’s budgeting office has put forward the same budget cuts to NASA and NASA Science that were rejected by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress last year,” the press release said. “This proposal needlessly resurrects an existential threat to US leadership in space science and exploration.”
The Trump administration’s budget blueprint calls for NASA to support development of “commercial replacements” for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. “Replacement of SLS and Orion with more cost-effective systems is critical to supporting more ambitious lunar missions, including the lunar base camp,” the White House said.
This is not a new idea. After the successful launch of the Artemis II mission this week, NASA will fly the SLS rocket at least a few more times, perhaps through Artemis V, as Congress has mandated. The budget proposal released Friday supports this plan. Isaacman has stated his desire to see NASA move away from the expendable SLS rocket when a commercial alternative, such as SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn, becomes available for human launches. That is still at least several years off.
“To execute missions beyond Artemis V, NASA will initiate a new procurement to obtain commercial transportation services to launch astronauts to rendezvous with the lunar landers,” the agency said in a budget summary that was published on Friday. This new procurement is expected to begin in fiscal year 2027, NASA said.
Elements of the vision unveiled by Isaacman and other NASA officials last week, such as deep space nuclear propulsion, nuclear reactors on the Moon, and prospecting for lunar resources, will require significant investment in new space technology. One new space tech project NASA would initiate under this budget is funding to support a commercial effort to produce, store, transfer, and test rocket propellant generated from resources on the Moon’s surface.
But the overall news for NASA’s space tech portfolio is not good. The White House proposes a $297 million reduction in NASA’s space technology directorate relative to this year—and $476 million less than 2025—with cuts targeted at what the Trump administration calls “frivolous technology projects with no applications.”
The White House budget office also proposes cutting $1.1 billion in funding for the International Space Station, keeping the retirement and de-orbit of the ISS on track for 2030. This runs counter to a congressional bill supported by key lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), extending the ISS until 2032.
NASA announced last week a new strategy to help commercial companies develop their own crewed outposts to replace the ISS in low-Earth orbit. Despite delays and concerns about the readiness of a new commercial station when NASA retires the ISS, the White House requested only a small increase in funding for this program in 2027.
The administration’s spending plan would continue Trump’s long-running effort to zero out funding for NASA’s education programs.
