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On April 3rd, the Administration released the 2027 President’s “skinny” budget, and several days later NASA released the full NASA FY27 Presidential budget request (PBR). You can download and read the budget request from NASA’s website. The FY27 budget request provides an eerie feeling of déjà vu. Like the FY26 PBR it again proposes existential cuts to NASA and to NASA’s Science budget specifically. As The Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier points out in a recent Guardian interview, the FY27 NASA PBR is “a baffling piece of political ideology from an alternate universe in which they didn’t suffer an overwhelming defeat of that proposal just months ago…” and is even “seemingly contradictory with a number of statements that NASA leadership said a few weeks ago at the Ignition event”. The American Astronomical Society, the American Geophysical Union and The Planetary Society have some breakdowns and discussion of the details of budget proposal. Bill Nye also gives a wonderful defense of NASA and lays out the PBR issues in a recent interview with ABC News. There are strong indications already that these proposed budget cuts will once again be rejected by Congress. Even before the budget proposal was released the bipartisan Planetary Caucus made up of 103 house members announced their full support for NASA’s science budget. And in a hearing on April 22nd, the House Science committee questioned Administrator Isaacman on the budget proposal, where both Republican and Democrats members indicated that they would again reject the proposed cuts. You can view the full hearing and Issacman’s responses which cover a full range of topics here. GESTA contributed a number of suggested questions to this bi-partisan panel for the House Science Committee hearing and the upcoming (April 30th) hearing with Isaacman in front of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS). Our feedback included emphasising the importance of Earth science-driven missions, sustaining internship programs (including Pathways and OSTEM) and STEM education. We emphasized the public pronouncements from Isaacman supporting the rebuilding of NASA’s workforce need to be paired with internal career pathways — internships, term conversions to permanent, and supporting postdocs and contractors who want to move into the civil service. We emphasized the importance of investing in inherently governmental functions and in fundamental research and technology development, rather than assuming these areas can be fulfilled by the private sector. Furthermore, we highlighted recent developments at GISS - Goddard Institute of Space Studies - Goddard’s premiere science and research facility in Manhattan, which was shuttered a year ago by DOGE. And that our subject matter experts (SMEs) there are now to be placed in mediocre cubical spaces with minimal access to the research tools, servers, and technology needed to effectively continue their work. We acknowledged that while it was excellent to hear Administrator Isaacman speak to how Earth science observations provide valuable research to agriculture, commerce, and public safety sectors, our SMEs who can do this valuable work are being sidelined. We asked Congressional members to help bring this awareness to the administrator. We are cautiously hopeful that NASA and Goddard leadership might change course from the destructive actions they took last year to implement the Deferred Resignation Program and the President’s budget request before Congress weighed in. However, it is now well known that the Office of Budget Management (OMB) has been playing a heavy role (likely illegally in many cases) in NASA and Center funding and program decisions. And Isaacman’s defense to the House Science Committee in the hearing that NASA has always prioritized resources based on the lesser of the proposed Presidential, Senate and House budgets was not reassuring. Bolstering such concerns, a second whistleblower report released April 17th by the minority members of the House Science committee details some of the damage done last year due to NASA’s pre-implementation of the FY26 PBR, highlighting three case studies. It is notable that Goddard leadership and missions bear a significant burden of the responsibility for the actions and impacts in two of the three case studies described, including the Advanced X-Ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) mission and the Joint Agency Satellite Division (JASD). The report concludes “NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center fatally undermined the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) proposal after its mission class was zeroed out in the FY26 PBR.” GESTA is cautiously optimistic that the severe actions taken last year by NASA and Center leadership might not be repeated, but we will continue to the best of our ability, along with all of you, to seek accountability, rebuild, and fight any continuing efforts aimed at weakening NASA’s workforce and its Congressionally-supported missions and programs. Comments are closed.
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