Preparing for the next NASA budget battle

When Congress passed a fiscal year 2026 “minibus” appropriations bill in January, much of the space community breathed a sigh of relief. Congress had rejected the steep cuts proposed by the Trump administration, including a nearly 25% reduction in the agency’s overall budget and nearly 50% to science. The agency ended up with funding close to its 2025 level.

While NASA avoided the worst of the proposed cuts, it did not escape them entirely. One part of the agency feeling the hurt from the budget is its planetary science program. In addition to Congress’s decision to cancel Mars Sample Return, the program’s overall budget of $2.7 billion in 2025 shrunk by nearly $200 million in 2026.

“We can’t continue everything from the past,” warned Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, during a town hall at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference March 16. “Not everything can continue forward or continue forward in the same way.”

NASA is still working on an operating plan, detailing how it will implement the budget, so she could not discuss specific missions in jeopardy. She suggested, though, that the future of some extended missions, like some at Mars, might be in question or only be approved for an additional year instead of the usual two or three.

There are also doubts about two missions to Venus, DAVINCI and VERITAS, that NASA is developing, along with its contributions to ESA’s EnVision Venus orbiter. “It is going to be a challenge to get all three Venus missions to continue,” she cautioned.

Even after that operating plan is approved, there are some worries about additional cuts in the form of impoundment by the administration, after similar efforts elsewhere in the government in 2025. There have already been reports of a delayed release of 2026 funding for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

“What we saw last year is always going to be a risk,” Jamie Wise, a staff member of the House Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science (CJS) subcommittee, said of impoundment at the Goddard Space Science Symposium March 13. Appropriators, he said, would be “very vigilant” about any efforts to impound NASA funding.

Even if there are no efforts to change 2026 spending levels, there will be a debate about the fiscal year 2027 budget, yet to be released by the White House. Wise is among those who think the 2027 budget proposal could be a rerun of the 2026 proposal and its steep cuts. [Editor’s note: This column was published in SpaceNews Magazine before the White House released its 2027 budget proposal, which we covered here.]

“I would probably follow the betting and say that ’27 is going to look like ’26,” he said.
Some in Congress are trying to get out ahead of potential cuts. A March 13 letter to the leadership of the House CJS appropriations subcommittee, signed by more than 100 members, requested a significant increase in NASA science funding: $9 billion, about a 25% increase from the funding approved for 2026.

That jump, the members wrote, would allow NASA science “to return to the trajectory it was on during the President’s first term, adjusted for inflation.” They also asked appropriators to increase NASA’s overall budget “to adjust for the inflationary pressures affecting the aerospace industry” and avoid having an increase in science come at the expense of other agency programs.

The letter asks appropriators to avoid “another round of wasteful, bureaucratic debate over priorities Congress has already settled” by effectively ignoring whatever 2027 budget the White House proposes for NASA.

“Swift, decisive action on the FY 2027 budget is the most powerful signal Congress can send to ensure that the instability created by the FY26 OMB budget request is not repeated,” they concluded.

With battle lines over NASA spending already being drawn, Wise urged a space industry audience not to put too much weight on the administration’s budget proposal, regardless of what it says and when it comes out.

“The advice I give people is never get too caught up in what’s in the budget proposal,” he said. “It is just the beginning of the process.”

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.