NASA administrator defends Trump’s proposed budget cuts

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Sunday backed the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to his agency, as the Artemis II mission continues.

“Yes, of course I do,” Isaacman said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when host Jake Tapper asked whether he supported the administration’s proposed budget cuts for fiscal 2027.

On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requested $18.8 billion for NASA from Congress, $5.6 billion less than the 2026 amount. 

The proposed budget would cut $3.4 billion from NASA’s science unit by terminating more than 40 “low-priority” missions. Among those are the Mars Sample Return mission and the SERVIR program, a climate-focused partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development that cost $10 million annually, according to OMB. 

The proposal would also cut $1.1 billion from the International Space Station, which is scheduled to be retired in 2030; $297 million from the space technology unit; and $143 million from NASA’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Engagement — including the termination of a program that funneled millions to engineering and data science initiatives at historically Black colleges and universities. 

Isaacman noted Sunday that NASA’s budget is “greater than every other space agency across the world,” and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last July, provided nearly $10 billion to NASA for missions to the moon and Mars, infrastructure improvements and other projects.

The administrator said that allotment “gives us the capability to get to the moon with frequency, to build the enduring presence on the moon, the moon base, which in itself is going to afford numerous scientific and technological development” opportunities.

“We are able to launch the Grace Roman Space Telescope at the end of 2026, 100 times the field of view of the Hubble telescope, 1,000 times the scan rate,” he added. “We’re going to launch a nuclear-powered octocopter in 2028 to explore Saturn’s moon of Titan within the budget environment.”

Included in the proposed budget is $8.5 billion for NASA’s Artemis program, with OMB noting that amount fully funds lunar landers, space suits, lunar surface systems and astronaut transportation systems needed to “safely and cost-effectively expand America’s presence to the surface of the Moon.”

Also Sunday, Isaacman touted the ongoing Artemis II mission, which began Wednesday and will start its lunar approach on Monday. During that portion of the journey, American astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will get the chance to see so-far unexplored parts of the moon.

“Essentially, in the next 24 hours, they will be on the far side of the moon,” Isaacman said of the quartet. “They will eclipse that record. And we’re going to learn an awful lot about the spacecraft, which is pretty paramount to set up for subsequent missions, like Artemis III in 2027, and, of course, the lunar landing itself on Artemis IV in 2028.”