NASA’s FY 2025 Budget | The Planetary Society

The President’s Budget Request for NASA for fiscal year 2025 is $25.4 billion, a 2% increase over 2024 and the same as 2023. The budget proposes flat or modest cuts to most directorates within the agency, a noted departure from previous plans, which originally called for billions of additional dollars over the coming years.This discrepancy is a consequence of strict spending caps passed by Congress in 2023, which functionally froze U.S. discretionary spending for two years. These arbitrary caps create a zero-sum game between federal agencies, and NASA, while respected and admired among lawmakers, is rarely a top priority.Given NASA’s ambitious slate of projects, including returning humans to the Moon, building up a commercial space industry, returning samples from Mars, creating a next-generation space telescope, and flying through the skies of Titan (to name only a few), this budget presents a serious programmatic challenge. If this budget trend continues, there is simply not enough funding to pursue the full slate of projects that the nation has asked its space agency to pursue.