To the surprise of no one at all, the 2027 presidential budget request is extremely bad for science. Remember, this is largely a political document, and Congress does not have to follow this. In the past year, Congress largely ignored the recommendations and appropriated a much flatter budget (though agency priorities are still set by the PBR for executive agencies). This new request shows that Vought et al. still would prefer to kill much public funding for science.
- NSF: request to cut from $8.8B (FY26 enacted) to $4B, a 56% cut that would eviscerate the agency.
- DOE: request to cut $1.1B from $8.4B (FY26 enacted) Office of Science budget.
- NASA: request to cut $5.6B from $24.4B (FY26 enacted), including $3.7B from science programs and $1.1B from the ISS.
- Commerce: This one shocks me. Request to cut $993M from NIST's $1.184B (FY26 enacted) budget. That would be an 84% cut (!!), seemingly destroying NIST. This needs to get headlines. Either the people making this recommendation have no idea what NIST does (seems plausible), or someone has a personal grudge against the standard kilogram.
- NIH: Proposed $5.5B cut from $47.2B (FY26 enacted).
- DOD: It's very hard to tell, especially since they're proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending including for missile defense. The proposed DOD increases vastly outweigh the cuts described above.
These cuts are proposed despite constant fretting that China is surpassing the US scientifically. This past year it took aggressive lobbying to ensure that Congress pushed back against these kinds of cuts. For those who favor continued public investment in science and engineering research in the US, the task of arguing against these kinds of cuts begins again now. As I've written before, this is a marathon not a sprint, and this will be an annual exercise under this administration.
