A chainsaw and a meat-ax

Former NASA chief: Trump’s budget takes ‘a chainsaw and a meat-ax’ to space agency

The administration is proposing a $6 billion budget cut to NASA.

By Connor O'Brien

Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Thursday ripped President Donald Trump’s proposed multi-billion-dollar cut to the space agency — arguing the administration is taking “a chainsaw and a meat-ax” to its mission.

Nelson — a former Democratic senator who led the space agency during the Biden administration — issued strong warnings against gutting NASA’s science budget at POLITICO’s Security Summit.

“You’ve got this incredible agency populated by what I call a bunch of wizards that, on a daily basis, make the impossible possible,” Nelson said. “And you are going at them with a chainsaw and a meat-ax.”

Trump is proposing a $6 billion cut to NASA funding in his budget, which the White House released the broad outlines of this month — a steep decline from the agency’s current $24.8 billion budget.

“You are going directly at what NASA is all about, which is a science, research and development agency with cutting-edge technology, and you’re cutting the guts and the heart out of that,” Nelson said.

While specific agency-level proposals haven’t been released yet, the White House has proposed slashing nearly $2.3 billion from NASA’s space science missions. The administration also wants to cut more than $1 billion from earth science programs, which include climate-change monitoring.

One of the only areas to seek a bump in Trump’s NASA budget is human space exploration efforts, which would see a $647 million boost aimed at supporting NASA’s lunar and Mars-focused efforts.

“That’s like eating our seed corn,” Nelson said. “We’re not going to have anything to plant next year in the quest of trying to understand what is part of the statutes for NASA, which is to search for life, and therefore to understand who we are, what we are, and where we are.”

Nelson, from space-heavy Florida, predicted some Republican lawmakers in states impacted by cuts to NASA programs could resist Trump’s efforts.

“What’s Ted Cruz gonna do?” Nelson asked, referencing the Texas GOP senator who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NASA. “The various interesting commercial companies, are they going to be so cowed that they will not speak up for their interests? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Nelson also revealed that he left a letter on his desk at NASA for the next Senate-confirmed administrator. Reading the letter, he urged the next chief to leave NASA in a better position and argued the space mission must “transcend the length of a single administration and a single administrator.”