US president Donald J. Trump has proposed massive cuts to federal science programs for fiscal year 2026, which runs from Oct. 1, 2025, through Sept. 30, 2026. The proposal, also referred to as the “skinny” budget because it provides less detail than a full budget request, is in line with Trump’s calls during his first term as president to slash funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other US federal agencies.
These proposed cuts came days before the European Commission announced that it was investing €500 million, or about $566 million, over the next 2 years to “make Europe a magnet for researchers.”
Although the Trump administration still needs to create a full budget request, Congress can take the skinny budget recommendations under consideration as it begins drafting its appropriation bills. During Trump’s previous presidency, Congress rarely went along with calls to slash science funding and even went as far as boosting science agency budgets.
Science advocacy organizations are now calling for lawmakers to do the same this year. “Make no mistake, if Congress enacts the President’s skinny budget, the consequences for the future of our nation would be catastrophic,” Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says in a statement released on May 2.
Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says in a separate May 2 statement that “the administration’s devastating funding cuts and layoffs already have damaged the nation’s future by gutting its scientific foundation. If Congress passes anything resembling this budget, there will, in fact, be a whole lot more harm inflicted on the public.”
Some lawmakers have already expressed concern about the president’s recommendations. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, calls the budget a “disaster for our nation’s science enterprise.”
But in a statement emailed to C&EN, Representative Brian Babin (R-TX), chair of the committee, gives a more neutral take: “While I share President Trump’s goal of advancing American leadership in exploration and innovation, I will closely examine this proposal to ensure it supports a strong, sustainable, and globally competitive science, space, and technology enterprise.”
Here’s how science agencies would fare under the president’s budget request.
The National Science Foundation
Trump’s proposal calls for the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to receive less than half of its current budget—$3.9 billion, down from around $9 billion enacted in fiscal year 2025. Although the plan does not specify how the reduced funds should be allocated across the agency’s eight directorates, it states that the cuts should come from research related to “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” It also calls for the elimination of programs dedicated to broadening the participation of people from groups historically underrepresented in science.
Only the NSF funding for artificial intelligence and quantum information science research would remain at current levels.
In a joint letter sent on May 3 to the chairs and ranking members of the appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, and science, 13 former NSF directors say that “such a budget would thwart scientific progress, decimate the research workforce, and take a decade or more to recover.” Instead, they ask Congress to double the NSF’s budget and ensure the agency has sufficient staff to carry out its work.
Regarding agency employees, the White House budget proposes to cut the funding the NSF receives to pay for salaries and administrative expenses by $93 million, aligning with other attempts to reduce the agency’s size.
In February, the agency fired its probationary employees, who were later reinstated after a court order. On April 24, the NSF also began offering its current staff an agency-specific options for voluntary resignation and early retirement, according to an internal email reviewed by C&EN.
Department of Health and Human Services
The proposed budget cuts the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), home to several major research agencies, by 26.2% overall compared with spending in fiscal year 2025.
One effort that would grow if the budget were passed as written is the Make America Healthy Again initiative, which would earmark $500 million to a list of priorities that includes rethinking nutrition, exercise, and reducing “over-reliance on medication and treatments,” the budget says.
Elsewhere in the HHS, however, the proposed plan entails major reductions to research capacity. It proposes to cut spending by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by $3.6 billion, down 39% from this fiscal year, and to eliminate efforts focused on chronic disease prevention, environmental health, and global health.
It also proposes to cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by nearly $18 billion, to about 39% below current funding levels. The White House document takes aim at the agency, stating that the “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research and the promotion of dangerous ideologies,” citing NIH research on gender-affirming care and advancing the controversial theory that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from an NIH-supported laboratory.
The brief description proposes to reorganize the NIH, eliminating centers devoted to health disparities, international health, nursing research, and complementary medicine.
In a statement released May 2, United for Medical Research, a coalition of research institutions, health advocates and private industry, calls the cuts to the NIH budget “shocking” and says that they “would be devastating to the NIH, researchers doing groundbreaking work, patients and families hoping for cures, and America’s economy.”
The proposal does not provide any details about the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, which is heavily supplemented by industry-paid user fees, particularly payments for reviews of new drugs and medical devices.
Environmental Protection Agency
Under the proposal, the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would be slashed by $5 billion, or 55% compared with enacted fiscal 2025 levels. The cuts would bring the agency’s funding down to levels last seen during the 1980s.
The proposal would eliminate nearly $235 million from the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), the scientific arm that conducts research for other EPA offices on topics such as air, water, and chemical safety. The proposed plan would create a new research office with 300 positions, housed under the EPA’s Office of the Administrator.
The White House justifies the cuts to the ORD in the proposed budget, writing “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.”
The proposal would also eliminate $2.5 billion from the EPA’s state revolving loan funds, which are used to help states pay for water infrastructure projects, such as removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from drinking water. In addition, $1 billion would be cut from the EPA’s categorical grant programs, which fund environmental cleanup projects for underresourced state agencies.
The EPA’s Superfund hazardous waste program would lose $254 million under the president’s proposal. The program would be primarily funded by taxes levied on the chemical industry and payments by responsible polluters through litigation settlements.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group that represents chemical manufacturers, has been fighting for years to eliminate the Superfund tax on chemicals. But the ACC welcomes the EPA’s shift toward focusing resources only on efforts required by law. The group is particularly hopeful that the EPA’s plan to move resources from the ORD to the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention will speed up the approval of new chemicals.
“The functions of this EPA office advance American competitiveness, further transformative ideas, and promote new domestic manufacturing by accessing applications for new and existing chemistries,” Chris Jahn, president and CEO of the ACC says in a statement.
The Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a group of former EPA employees, sounded the alarm over the proposal during a May 5 press briefing. “These cuts will lead to dirtier air, unsafe drinking water, slower toxic cleanups, and a weaker response to environmental disasters,” said EPN’s executive director Michelle Roos. “This is not modernization. It’s a dismantling of our national scientific capacity at a time when it’s needed the most.”
NASA
The proposed budget would cut $6 billion from NASA’s funding, about 24% of the agency’s enacted budget in the 2025 fiscal year the most substantial, single-year funding reduction in the agency’s history, the Planetary Society says in a statement.
Most proposed cuts focus on NASA science research programs. The budget proposes canceling the long-anticipated Mars sample return mission, eliminating climate-monitoring satellites and funding toward green aviation research, reducing the research operations on the International Space Station, and reshaping future crewed missions to the moon.
The proposal also adds $647 million to fund human space exploration programs. In a press release, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro says, “this proposal includes investments to simultaneously pursue exploration of the Moon and Mars while still prioritizing critical science and technology research.”
But Ben Tutolo, a geochemist at the University of Calgary and participating scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity mission, says, “I think it's short-term thinking to believe that cutting these missions is not going to have negative consequences across the entire US science ecosystem and economy.”
The US funding ecosystem, and NASA in particular, is “a shining light in terms of how to train the next generation of scientists,” Tutolo says. He believes the cuts would undermine the scientific workforce in the US.
Ultimately, Tutolo says that if the proposed cuts are approved by Congress, the US could cede its leadership in the space sector. “If you basically axe the next 10 years of planning for Mars science coming out of NASA, there's no question that Chinese scientists are going to catch up and probably surpass that work,” he says.
Representatives Judy Chu (D-CA) and Don Bacon (R-NE), cochairs of the Congressional Planetary Science Caucus, say in a joint statement that they will work with Congress to “ensure full and robust funding for NASA Science in Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations. Together, we must maintain America’s preeminence in space.”
Other departments and agencies
The proposal would cut funding for the Department of Energy by nearly $5 billion. A portion of that reduction will come from the Office of Science, which according to its website is “the nation’s largest federal sponsor of basic research in the physical sciences.”
Regarding the Office of Science, the proposed budget would reduce funding for climate change and clean energy research but would “maintain U.S. competitiveness in priority areas such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, quantum information science, fusion, and critical minerals.”
The proposed budget includes few details about the $1.3 billion spending cut it is seeking from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—close to 30% down from the agency’s current funding levels. It does, however, say that cuts would come from “climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs.”
Finally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology would also see its budget slashed by $325 million—a 28% cut—which will likely target programs that focus on sustainability- or climate-related research. Earlier this year, the Trump administration said it planned to close NIST’s Atomic Spectroscopy Group, which measures and compiles data on atomic properties used in a wide range of disciplines.