US President Donald Trump has proposed stiff cuts to the budgets of US science agencies for 2026.Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty
US President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for unprecedented cuts to scientific agencies that, if enacted, would deal a devastating blow to US science, policy specialists say.
The budget document released by the White House on Friday for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts on 1 October, is light on details, but it calls for disproportionately large cuts for federal science funding. According to the White House document, the proposal would cut all non-defence spending by 23% but targets the US National Science Foundation for a 56% funding reduction, and would slash the budget of the US National Institutes of Health by roughly 40%. The Environmental Protection Agency, which on Friday also announced plans to dismantle its primary research division, would be hit by a 55% cut as the administration seeks to eliminate what it calls “radical” and “woke” climate programmes.
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Later this month, the administration is expected to release a more-detailed budget than the “skinny budget” released today, and science-policy experts say that Trump might still seek cuts to the budget for fiscal year 2025.
Ultimately, it is the US Congress that decides how the federal budget will be spent — not the president. But Trump’s proposal is a starting point for congressional negotiations, and there are signs that many members of Congress will go along with Trump’s recommendations. Both Trump and the majority of members of Congress are Republicans.
In a statement, US representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that the budget “lays the foundation for restoring a government that serves the people – not itself.”
Science-policy experts say the budget could be disastrous for the next generation of scientists. “The message that this sends to young scientists is that this country is not a place for you,” says Michael Lubell, a physicist who tracks science policy at the City University of New York in New York City. “If I were starting my career, I would be out of here in a heartbeat.”
If Congress enacts this budget, “the consequences for the future of our nation will be catastrophic,” Sudip Parikh, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, a non-profit group that represents scientists, said in a statement.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions from Nature about the budget request or scientists’ concerns about it.
Nature’s news team breaks down the budget proposal and implications for science.
National Science Foundation
Under Trump’s proposal, the 2026 budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the world’s leading funders of basic research, would drop roughly US$5 billion, a cut of about half compared to its 2024 budget. The budget targets climate science, clean energy, and “woke” social, behavioural, and economic sciences. It would also cut “broadening participation” programmes, which aim to attract members of underrepresented groups to science, by $1.1 billion, a roughly 80% reduction from the last few years.
Although the funding for artificial intelligence (AI) research and quantum sciences would be kept at current levels, it is unclear how well the agency itself will function: the budget calls for a $93 million cut to operations, a 20% decrease. Media reports say that half of the NSF staff could be terminated. If the cuts go through, “I don’t know how the agency functions as Congress intended it,” says Kenneth Evans, a science policy researcher at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
National Institutes of Health
The administration has proposed slashing the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from about $48 billion in 2025 to roughly $27 billion in 2026 — a cut of some 40%. If enacted, this would be the most drastic cut ever for the NIH, which is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.
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The request also proposes collapsing many of the agency’s 27 institutes and centres into five new ‘focus areas’. Funding for institutes that perform minority-health and international research would be eliminated entirely.
These cuts would “absolutely devastate the biomedical research enterprise” and the US economy, which is dependent on that enterprise, says Carole LaBonne, a stem-cell biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “It’s incredibly short-sighted.”
The Trump team justifies these massive cuts by repeating its previous criticisms of the agency: “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” the budget document says.
Former NIH director Monica Bertagnolli, who was appointed by former president Joe Biden, a Democrat, says she was appalled to see the administration’s rhetoric: “Each one of these statements has been litigated in the past and found to be grossly inaccurate or false,” she says. “This is a very unfortunate and distorted view of an organization I know to be dedicated to improving the health of all people.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The administration seeks to cut the $9.6 billion budget for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by one-third and to eliminate programmes such as one aimed at preventing chronic diseases. That’s despite the stated commitment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services oversees the CDC, to support such activities.
NASA
NASA’s budget would drop 24.3% from its 2025 level, to $18.8 billion in 2026. That’s the largest single-year cut relative to the previous year’s funding ever proposed. The agency’s science division, including astrophysics, planetary, and earth science research, would be slashed by nearly half. Among the projects targeted for cancellation are climate-monitoring satellites and plans to bring back rock samples from Mars using robotic spacecraft. A coalition of space advocates has spoken out in recent weeks against the proposed cuts, saying they would usher in a “dark age of space science at NASA”.
Human spaceflight programmes would see dramatic changes: the proposed budget cuts funding for the International Space Station, but pours more money into lunar and Mars exploration — including $1 billion for unspecified “Mars-focused” programmes. That’s in keeping with the administration’s priority of landing astronauts on the Moon and Mars before China does. The budget proposes retiring the government’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket after two more flights, including one scheduled to take astronauts to the Moon in 2026.
