It’s been a busy week for
space-policy news. Let’s start with the biggest bombshell, which is the
Trump administration’s
sudden over-the-weekend withdrawal
of Jared Isaacman’s nomination to lead NASA. Isaacman, a billionaire
entrepreneur and private astronaut, was widely seen as an
offbeat-but-brilliant pick for the role; all signs suggested he’d
smoothly sail through a Senate confirmation that had been scheduled for
this week. Instead, Isaacman’s nomination apparently
was scuttled at least in part by his close association with Elon Musk, who seems increasingly out-of-step with the president’s policy goals after
an acrimonious official exit from Trump’s administration.
Musk’s ire concerns Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” for the federal budget in fiscal year 2025, which Musk has called
a “disgusting abomination.”
Now under consideration by the Senate, the bill’s mix of massive tax
cuts and profligate spending would, according to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office, swell the national deficit by
nearly $2.5 trillion.
But
while all this drama unfolds over the current fiscal year, in the
background a smaller, more subtle budgetary conflict is simmering over
the next one. Last Friday, the White House released its
detailed budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, and the outlook for U.S. space science is grim, to say the least. As
our top story
details, the proposed cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation
(NSF) are so deep that, if enacted, both would face existential crises
and be forced to abandon huge swaths of their long-held agency-level
goals. In NASA’s case, the 25 percent cut to its bottom line would
entail axing dozens of operational or near-future missions, among other
woes; the NSF would suffer a grievous nearly 60 percent reduction in
total funding—a starvation-diet scenario in which some (but not all) of
its high-profile facilities would be kept alive but at the high cost of
eliminating most NSF research grants.
This would be, as one
source says, an “end-game scenario” that blows “a generation-size hole,
maybe a multigenerational hole, in the [U.S.] scientific and technical
workforce.” Presumably geopolitical competitors, such as China, would be
eager to pick up where the U.S. left off, ascending to become the new
global leader in space science and exploration. I’ll leave it to you,
dear reader, to judge whether such an outcome would really help “Make
America Great Again.”
Suffice to say that one additional
contributor to Isaacman’s abrupt departure may have been the possibility
he’d push back against the devastating implications of Trump’s plans
for NASA. Now, the resulting leadership vacuum at NASA (and at the NSF,
as its director suddenly resigned in April) makes any formal
agency-level opposition all the more unlikely. Instead, the fate of the
national scientific enterprise increasingly seems to rest with a handful
of powerful legislators in the Senate—or, thinking far more
idealistically, with the members of the public whom they purportedly
represent.
Thoughts? Questions? Let me know via e-mail (lbillings@sciam.com),
Twitter or
Bluesky.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time.
—Lee Billings