INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget
request for NASA with the space agency.This initial version of the administration's budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent
overall cut to the agency's budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion
However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science,
Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's
science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding
After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of
just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater
than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30
percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble
Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory
seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years."Passback
supports continued operation of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and assumes no funding is provided for other telescopes," the
