This Month
Sometimes, preserving funding for science isn’t enough.
Though NASA was spared the worst of the cuts proposed over the last two years, the agency is on track to award the fewest scientific grants in 15 years.
With only two weeks to go in the U.S. government’s fiscal year, NASA has awarded 1,188 new grants for basic scientific research. That’s roughly 15% fewer than the historic baseline, and almost exactly equal to 2025.
This has occurred despite consistent funding provided to basic science at NASA over the past few years. The White House’s attempt to cut science funding by nearly 50% was rejected by the U.S. Congress in 2025 in a rare show of bipartisan unity, and is likely to do so again in 2026.
Impoundment, when the executive branch refuses to spend money allocated by Congress, wasn’t the problem, either. NASA duly spent the money it was directed to spend and actually spent more in 2025 than in recent years, yet the agency ultimately supported fewer scientists. It did so by increasing the median value of each grant. This is consistent with reports of the agency “advance-funding” grants for the year ahead, simply to get money out the door before spending authority expires at the end of the fiscal year.
It’s hard to pin down any single cause for this. NASA’s reporting of its grant activities has become opaque, and key sources of information have been removed from public access.
But actions taken by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget suggest that it could be the result of new and burdensome administrative rules, the loss of NASA personnel necessary to administer the grant program (NASA’s Shared Services Center, which controls the awards, is reported to have lost upwards of a fifth of its staff in the past year), as well as the large funding cuts constantly being proposed to these programs.
I had the opportunity this month to present these results to a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. My point was this: tracking the overall funding Congress allocates for science programs is not enough. We must look at the impact on individual scientists. In space science, we’re seeing increasing strain placed on a community with fewer opportunities to get the resources needed to study the data our spacecraft have already collected.
Until next month,
Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society
