GOP-controlled Congress derails Trump effort to cut funding from key agency

06 January

President Donald Trump with Sen. John Thune and First Lady Melania Trump on January 8, 2025 (Office of Senator John Thune/Wikimedia Commons)

The House and Senate are gearing up for another rare rebuke of Donald Trump, this time pushing back against his major funding cuts for NASA.

While the Republican-controlled chambers of Congress have rarely pushed back against Trump during his second term, there have been a few examples of House Republicans bucking the president. Most notably, all but one of the Republicans in the House joined every Democrat in voting to release the Epstein files, a bill Trump opposed, with the measure also passing the Senate by unanimous consent.

On Tuesday, the House and Senate released a new budget proposal for NASA, per a report from Space.com, which would allocate $24.6 billion in funding for the agency for the fiscal year of 2026, which has been underway since October. This comes as a rebuke to the Trump White House's previous federal budget, which called for only $18.8 billion in funding, a drop of nearly 25 percent from its funding in the previous year.

In line with the administration's massive cuts to federal scientific research, NASA's science division had the steepest cut, down roughly 75 percent to just $3.9 billion. Most of the funds added back in the Senate and House proposal would go to the science division.

"The bill rejects the administration’s devastating proposal to cut NASA Science by 47 perecnt and terminate 55 operating and planned missions," the Senate's bill summary explained. "It instead provides $7.25 billion."

Several hurdles still exist for this budget to become a reality. Both the House and the Senate would need to vote on it, a process that could see its provisions change. Voting could potentially begin as early as this week, or next week. Trump would also then have to sign the budget into law, which is not a guarantee now that he has begun issuing vetoes.

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