NASA astronaut Megan McArthur took this photo in 2021 of the cupola on the International Space Station.
For universities that receive millions in research dollars from NASA each year, confirmation of the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts could require them to dramatically reduce their activities, and in some cases, perhaps eliminate entire programs.
The White House described the broad contours of its fiscal 2026 proposal in the “skinny” budget document published today by the Office of Management and Budget. NASA would receive $18.8 billion, a 24.3% reduction of the current budget, with deeper cuts proposed for specific divisions. These include a $2.3 billion reduction of space science and $1.2 billion reduction of Earth science, with funding eliminated for “low-priority climate monitoring satellites” and Mars Sample Return, among other programs. By contrast, “human space exploration” would get a $647 million increase, “In line with the Administration’s objectives of returning to the Moon before China and putting a man on Mars.”
Even before reports of the proposed cuts began circulating last month, at least two universities began preparing contingency plans for their departments and laboratories, according to my interviews with officials from the University of Arizona and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP. The universities received a combined $237 million from NASA in fiscal 2023, the most recent year for which the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics’ Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey is available. NASA constituted the single largest source of research and development dollars for CU Boulder that year and the second largest for the University of Arizona.
LASP interim director Frank Eparvier says an early sign of trouble came even earlier — in February, when NASA did not publish its annual ROSES solicitation, short for Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science. Another complication came in March, when Congress voted to continue funding the government at fiscal 2024 levels, rather than pass a brand new fiscal 2025 budget. The bill noted some exceptions, along with the caveat that any fiscal 2024 “congressional earmark, community project funding or congressionally directed spending item” is no longer legally binding. Instead, government departments and agencies were directed to submit their individual operating plans to Congress in 45 days.
Given these events, Eparvier says he is worried that the fiscal 2026 cuts could effectively “come early” because NASA might preemptively adjust to the proposed 2026 spending levels.
NASA didn’t reply to a query about the status of ROSES.
Eparvier says programs at LASP have already been affected. Some work is “at stages where we’re moving to the next phase of development, and the decisions on continued funding have been delayed, and we’ve had to stretch out [existing funds] or been told to lay out scenarios for stretching out or even cancellation,” he says, though he declined to name the specific programs.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are missions in the extended operations phase. These include the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has observed near-Earth space since 2010, and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, orbiter that is coming up on its 11th year in Mars orbit. Such older spacecraft are reportedly under consideration for budget cuts or termination, specifically those in NASA’s Earth Science Division, Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) told reporters last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
In Eparvier’s view, such a broad-brush approach would be a mistake, particularly regarding missions that have exceeded their estimated lifespan. Such spacecraft are often “key to getting the sort of science data and information that’s needed to protect the astronauts who are going to go to the moon and Mars,” he says.
He adds: “And if this administration wants to send people to Mars and to the moon, they need the data and the scientific understanding from those Science Mission Directorate missions — or they’re going to have dead astronauts, basically.”
In fiscal 2024, NASA funding comprised about 70% of LASP’s $202.9 million in grants, so any widespread cuts would affect more than just research, Eparvier says. For instance, canceling research also cancels the associated training. About a quarter of LASP’s approximately 750 employees are students who are “getting hands-on education designing, building, testing, and analyzing data from space missions.”
LASP has also started to review whether, in place of hiring, “the internal people we already have can meet those requirements,” though he stopped short of calling the situation a hiring freeze.
Versions of these conversations are also happening at the University of Arizona, where researchers operate the only instrument — to their knowledge — that takes very-high-resolution images of the surface of Mars. Since entering orbit aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2006, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, camera has captured images at a resolution of less than a meter per pixel. That’s been invaluable for identifying landing sites for robotic spacecraft, says Alfred McEwan, the longtime principal investigator. The skinny budget document did not mention reducing or terminating funding for MRO specifically, but McEwan noted that canceling it would require NASA to identify other methods of determining landing sites for future human missions to Mars, a goal that President Donald Trump referenced in his January inaugural address.
But for now, HiRISE is still taking pictures. “We’re just carrying on with our experiment because there’s nothing else for us to do until we get more information,” McEwan says. “As the remaining fiscal year dwindles, any cut has to be taken over even a shorter period of time, so it becomes more and more impossible to accommodate any sizable cut.”
The university has “done everything we possibly can to become more efficient,” as the budget for HiRISE has shrunk over the years, McEwan says. They’ve already reduced the operating costs to about $3 million a year — roughly one-third of the original budget.
“There’s nothing left to cut except to just stop operating — maybe only operate half of the time or something like that,” he says. “That’s all that’s left for us to do.”
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