You just saved NASA's budget

In a rapid turn of events, Congress introduced, passed, and sent to the President a budget bill that rejected almost all the cuts proposed by the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) for NASA’s 2026 fiscal year. 

The bill provides NASA with a budget of $24.44 billion, around 1.7% below the currently enacted funding levels. For NASA Science, the budget only trims 1% off the topline, bringing it to $7.25 billion. Accounting for the additional $10 billion allocated to NASA over the next six years by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the resulting NASA budget for FY 2026 is the largest in nearly three decades, constituting a near-complete victory for the Save NASA Science campaign and the tens of thousands of advocates who participated.

But with a workforce and public shaken by a months-long effort to surrender U.S. leadership in space science, there are still concerns about how NASA can stay on the cutting edge of space exploration even with this budgetary win.

What we were facing 

In May 2025, the OMB proposed the largest single-year cut to NASA in history: a 24% reduction for the agency overall, including a 47% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Those proposed cuts were used to shrink competitive research programs, draw up termination plans for 19 in-flight space missions, and coerce more than 4,000 civil servants to leave the agency. 

Our response was immediate and sustained, incorporating record numbers of space advocates, partner organizations, and congressional outreach. You can read about our actions in our 2025 Impact Report. Suffice to say, this was a pivotal year for NASA and NASA Science, and we did everything we could to help push back against these wasteful and destructive proposals.

What Congress just passed

On the morning of Jan. 5, as Members of Congress returned to work after the holidays, the bill, H.R. 6938, was released by House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma. H.R. 6938 is a “minibus” — three funding bills packaged together and included Commerce-Justice-Science, Energy-Water, and Interior-Environment. NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other science agencies are contained in the first section of the bill (CJS for short). 

It was a piece of compromise legislation designed to move quickly through Congress. And it did. The House voted 397-28 in favor on Jan. 8, and the Senate followed suit with a vote of 82-15 on Jan. 15. Now the bill awaits President Trump’s signature to become law. He is expected to sign.

Poring over the details of this legislation, one thing is clear: the OMB-led cuts to NASA were soundly rejected by Congress.

The NASA Office of STEM Engagement, eliminated entirely in the OMB proposal, is also fully funded in the minibus. The National Science Foundation, a vital part of the American scientific enterprise, is funded just below current levels at $8.75 billion. 

In addition to these topline funding levels, the minibus came with a Joint Explanatory Statement, or JES, much like other appropriations bills come with a “report” that provides finer details and direction about the programs Congress intends to fund. Note that the usage of the word “joint” in the name indicates that the contents of the JES were agreed to by both House and Senate leadership. 

Additionally, the legal text includes language that makes the JES statutory, meaning it is not just a request, but a requirement for agencies to follow. This is not atypical, but represents Congress’s intent to make its point abundantly clear. The JES, with this backing, also includes a key provision in its opening crawl: “Unless otherwise noted, the language set forth in House Report 119-272 and the Senate Report 119-44 carries the same weight as language included in this joint explanatory statement.” This is good because the House and Senate reports had many more directions for NASA, especially as it relates to the Science programs, than the JES has. With this in mind, consulting the House and Senate reports and the JES, we get a better sense of what space missions, that were previously under threat, were saved by the minibus.

There’s an additional level of detail that’s important to this story. Despite the small cut to discretionary spending for NASA, the minibus isn’t the only source of funding for NASA in FY 2026. Over the summer, Congress passed H.R. 1, or the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” This budget reconciliation law included $10 billion for NASA, mainly for human spaceflight activities, over the next six years. There are requirements in H.R. 1 that require NASA to spend a certain amount of money per year, meaning that we can combine this supplemental funding with what Congress just passed to get a full picture of the FY 2026 budget.

The result is that NASA will receive slightly more than $27.53 billion in FY 2026. Based on the data available in our Historical NASA Budget Data tracker, this is the largest budget for NASA since FY 1998, when adjusted for inflation. The breakdown of funding sources shows that the supplemental funding, primarily for NASA’s human spaceflight activities, allowed Congress to rebalance and protect Science funding without impacting other NASA programs.

Finally, the minibus addresses a key concern that many in the space community had in 2025: the impoundment of funds. Impoundment is when an Administration refuses to spend the money Congress allocates to it. OMB Director Russ Vought gave weight to these concerns by repeatedly stating his intent not to spend all of the money Congress allocates to agencies, calling appropriations a "ceiling, not a floor" for federal spending, and to send the money back with so little lead time before the end of the fiscal year that Congress can’t act. OMB attempted only one so-called pocket rescission in 2025, and it was aimed at funding for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.

A provision in the House budget proposal from last July would prevent this from happening to NASA by requiring the agency to spend “no less than” the allocated amount on each science division. This was a key priority for the Save NASA Science Day of Action, and the minibus includes exactly the language requested. The threat of impoundment isn’t gone, but there is now a legal backstop in place to prevent it from happening to NASA. 

More good news is that, according to publicly available data on science mission budgets, no mission funding was impounded by OMB in FY 2025. 

What we lost

Though these legislative victories are to be celebrated, the flat funding provided by the minibus should be cause for concern. NASA’s budget has not seen meaningful growth since FY 2022. The enactment of the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023 limited growth across all discretionary spending accounts in FY 2023 and 2024, and the year-long continuing resolution for FY 2025 kept funding at FY 2024 levels. This has significantly impacted the Science Mission Directorate, which now has almost the same purchasing power it had in FY 2016. 

One mission canceled by the OMB proposal that made its way into the final budget was Mars Sample Return. The top priority of the last two planetary science decadal surveys, sample return from Mars, is key to helping scientists better understand the geological and possible astrobiological history of Mars. Samples collected by the Perseverance rover, including the tantalizing Cheyava Falls rock core, may be the most valuable objects in the Solar System. Returning these samples would be one of the greatest feats in human history and could be key to discovering if life ever existed on the Martian surface. 

But the fact of the matter is that the Mars Sample Return program has been in limbo for over two years. NASA does not have a plan, despite soliciting feedback from industry and multiple companies publicly announcing their ideas. Though the FY 2026 minibus formally closes down the MSR program office, it was former NASA administrator Bill Nelson’s deference to then-incoming Administrator Jared Isaacman, who then didn’t start the job for another 11 months after this decision was made, that was actually the death knell for Mars Sample Return.

Those samples are not abandoned on the surface of Mars. Congress offers a beacon of hope for the future of sample return. Included in the minibus is a provision that allocates $110 million to a new Mars Future Missions project, with the intended goal of developing a common set of technologies that NASA can use for robotic and eventually crewed missions to Mars. Sample return is among them. As stated in The Planetary Society’s principles for Mars Sample Return, the scientific case has been made for the importance of the samples collected by the Perseverance rover. This could potentially lay the groundwork for a new era of Mars exploration that enables sample return and other Mars science and human exploration goals.

But more than the funding stagnation or mission cancellations, the greatest casualty of 2025 was the loss of expertise at NASA and its partners around the country. Early in the Trump administration’s second tenure, civil servants were offered a choice: stay employed and potentially get laid off through a Reduction in Force (RIF), or take a buyout — the government would still pay their salary, but they’d be placed on leave until the end of the year.

At NASA, roughly 4,000 people participated in this Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). And though the RIFs as promised by OMB never came, some offices, like the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, were shut down and their employees laid off. 

Private sector workers and researchers were not given a choice like the DRP. Funding uncertainty forced many aerospace companies to lay off thousands or reassign staff to other projects, often outside of the space domain. And many of these scientists, engineers, and professionals have left the space industry entirely, taking their skills elsewhere. Others have moved overseas, opting to contribute to international space programs that offer more stability.

The irony is stark: NASA has its largest budget in nearly three decades, but has fewer employees than it had in July 1960 at the dawn of the space age. Rebuilding our national capabilities will take time, effort, and a sustained political commitment, not to mention consistent funding. 

With an ambitious plan to send humans back to the Moon, launch multiple high-profile science missions, and develop technologies on the edge of human capability, NASA’s biggest challenge might not be technical in nature, but rather organizational. The work to rebuild begins now.

What happens next

The bill will be signed into law by the President. Now begins the process of implementation. Administrator Isaacman and his team have 45 days to put together a plan to spend these funds through Sept. 30, 2026.

Back in December, at his second confirmation hearing, Administrator Isaacman committed to following the law and spending the money Congress appropriates to NASA. This will be a test of how the administrator will develop his relationship with Congress. Concurrent with developing a spending plan, the administration is expected to release its FY 2027 budget request in February or March. Expect Administrator Isaacman to be brought in front of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees for testimony about these proposals as we begin the next appropriations cycle.

Where you come in 

The victory we achieved with the FY 2026 minibus happened because tens of thousands of people, representing every congressional district in the country, took action. Nearly 85,000 messages were sent to Congress, and more than 300 people attended two Days of Action. This was all a part of the largest and most successful grassroots mobilization for space science in history.

I want to acknowledge the contributions of those who stood alongside the Save NASA Science campaign. Most importantly, I want to thank the members and supporters of The Planetary Society who made their voices heard when it mattered most. This victory would not have been possible without the Co-Chairs of the Planetary Science Caucus, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) and Representative Judy Chu (D-CA), who led the effort to build bipartisan support in Congress; Representative Glenn Ivey, who is a tireless champion for NASA science and literally stood by our side along the way; the two dozen partners on the Day of Action and other activities that helped build and maintain a historic coalition; and Senators Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Dale Strong (R-AL) and Grace Meng (D-NY), who led the effort to protect NASA funding on the Appropriations Committees.

I’m pleased to close this report by declaring that the budget crisis is over. But in its wake are many significant challenges and concerns that need to be addressed. The Planetary Society stands ready to advocate, collaborate, and mobilize to advance humanity’s journey to know the Cosmos and our place within it.