Keith’s note: According to a release “Science Committee Democratic Staff Report Reveals Details on NASA’s Illegal Implementation of Trump’s FY2026 Budget Request Without Congressional Approval” – “A Presidential budget request means nothing until Congress acts on it,” said Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren. “And in 2025, NASA implemented Trump’s budget proposal illegally, without any approval from Congress. The agency violated the basic separation-of-powers framework set forth in the Constitution. NASA’s actions derailed critical projects, demoralized its employees, and broke its trust with the scientific community and the private sector. NASA repeatedly denied what it was doing, but the facts prove otherwise. This staff report provides an overview of the evidence my team has gathered and highlights the damage NASA inflicted upon itself by yielding to pressure from OMB instead of following the law.” More below
Ranking Member Lofgren continued, “A President’s Budget Request is not law. It cannot supersede the laws enacted by Congress. NASA must heed the warning of this report and prevent what happened in 2025 from happening again.”
The staff report, Mission Aborted: How NASA Illegally Implemented the President’s Budget Request Without Congressional Approval, brings to light NASA’s blatant disregard for the laws enacted by Congress and the severe consequences of this recklessness for the agency and the country.
The report has six key findings:
- In 2025, NASA acted in concrete and formal ways to implement the proposals of the President’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26 PBR).
- Senior political appointees, including then-Chief of Staff Brian Hughes and then-Senior Advisor to the Administrator Ryan Whitley, ordered staff to implement the FY26 PBR.
- Numerous whistleblowers throughout the agency disclosed firsthand accounts to Committee Staff about the FY26 PBR being implemented.
- NASA ordered the cancelation of the Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) project on the day that the full FY26 PBR was released.
- NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center fatally undermined the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) proposal after its mission class was zeroed out in the FY26 PBR.
- NASA eliminated the Joint Agency Satellite Division (JASD) after the FY26 PBR proposed to end NASA’s role as the acquisition agent for NOAA’s satellite programs.
The report is informed by whistleblower testimonies, documents, and emails, obtained from the Committee’s investigation, to confirm that NASA illegally implemented President Trump’s FY2026 budget request.
The Democratic Staff Report can be found here.
Yes it is illegal. Yes it is not done with proper procedure. Yes managers should not do programmatic actions in reckless manner. But they did it anyway, afterall who’s going to stop them?
Typically a program receives a pot of money allocated in the Congressional budget, and the managers of the program then determine how the money is to be spent. If I’m not mistaken, unless a specific program/project (e.g. EPFD, AXIS) is a line item with a designated budget in the Congressional budget, budgetary decisions about those programs/projects are within the discretion of the program managers responsible for the overall pot of money allocated to their programs. The same applies to a Division within an organization’s management structure. The PBR can identify priorities of the administration. If the programs and the Division are identified line items with designated budgets, then defunding them requires Congressional action, if they’re not, responding to the administration priorities is within the normal budgetary management responsibilities of the relevant managers. Don’t know what is the status of EPFD, AXIS, and the JASD division.