Congress passes $24.4 billion NASA budget, rejecting Trump's deep cuts

Congress just sent NASA a monetary lifeline.

On Thursday (Jan. 15), the U.S. Senate passed a "minibus" spending bill that allocates $24.4 billion to NASA for fiscal year 2026 (FY26), which began on Oct. 1. The House of Representatives passed the same legislation last week, which means the bill now just needs President Donald Trump's signature to become law.

And the president is expected to sign, according to the nonprofit Planetary Society, even though the legislation is a rejection of the deep cuts Trump proposed for NASA last spring.

The president's 2026 budget proposal allocated just $18.8 billion to NASA, a 24% reduction from 2025 levels. The deepest cuts were to the agency's science programs, which had their funding slashed by 47% — a figure that, if enacted, would have terminated more than 40 NASA missions.

But influential members of the House and Senate had long signaled that they were not on board with this budgetary plan — a key fact, obviously, as Congress controls the nation's purse strings.

And they backed their words up with votes over the past week: The minibus passed the House 397-28 and the Senate 82-15.

The legislation consists of three appropriations bills, called Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (which deals with funding for NASA and the National Science Foundation); Energy and Water Development; and Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies.

"Today, we sent funding bills to the president's desk that reject the steep cuts he wanted and protect investments that families across America depend on every day," Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and ranking member of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, said in a statement on Thursday.

"This package saves a key program to save families on their energy bills, sustains our investments in scientific research, and protects essential funding for our public lands and Tribes, among so much else," she added.

The new legislation almost completely rejects Trump's deep cuts to NASA science. The White House proposed just $3.9 billion for the agency's Science Mission Directorate for FY26, but the minibus allocates $7.25 billion — just a 1% drop from enacted 2025 levels.

The new funding saves dozens of missions that were slated to be terminated under the White House's budget proposal, including the Da Vinci and VERITAS Venus probes (which have yet to launch) and the New Horizons Pluto mission, the Juno Jupiter orbiter and the OSIRIS-APEX asteroid project (which are all operational in deep space).

One big-ticket item remains canceled, however: Mars Sample Return (MSR), NASA's planned campaign to bring to Earth pieces of the Red Planet collected by its Perseverance rover. But the baseline MSR architecture has faced delays and cost overruns for a while now, and NASA is already looking for new ways to get the samples home.

The newly passed legislation isn't the whole story on NASA's 2026 funding, by the way; the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which Congress passed last summer, allocates $10 billion to the agency over the next six years, mostly to fund human spaceflight activities, as The Planetary Society pointed out.

"The result is that NASA will receive slightly more than $27.53 billion in FY 2026. Based on the data available in our Historical NASA Budget Data tracker, this is the largest budget for NASA since FY 1998, when adjusted for inflation," Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at The Planetary Society, wrote in an update on Thursday.