Congressional Democrats Assail Trump’s Plans for Deep Cuts to Government Science

With NOAA and NASA, two key climate research agencies, in the cross-hairs, Maryland officials see a privatization plan in the works.

GREENBELT, Md.—Congressional Democrats who represent the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., that are home to one of NASA’s premier research centers on Monday blasted the Trump administration’s plans for deep cuts in government science programs. And they raised concerns that the administration intends to hand agency work to private companies to the detriment of the public.

“I think part of their motivation here is to attack the heart of the NASA space science center enterprise in order to contract it out, ultimately to themselves,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland’s senior senator. “I think there’s no doubt when you have a billionaire cabinet and when you have the folks who are sitting behind President Trump on his Inauguration Day—including Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who has a direct interest in space.”

Musk, the billionaire donor who is leading much of Trump’s budget cutting-drive, is chief executive of SpaceX, the world’s leading space launch company. Musk on Friday posted on his social media site, X, that he found the planned science program cuts “troubling,” but added that he was not participating in NASA budget talks because SpaceX was a major contractor to the agency.

Van Hollen and other lawmakers met with reporters outside NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, which employs more than 10,000 engineers and scientists who design and build spacecraft and instruments that study both Earth and space. One of the jobs of NASA Goddard is to service the satellites the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to study climate change. 

Late last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) circulated a memo that called for cutting NASA’s science budget in half and eliminating most of NOAA’s climate research. That memo, which was viewed by Inside Climate News, called for a reorientation of NOAA to focus exclusively on weather and not on study of atmospheric and ocean composition. The memo also called for termination of NASA’s role in working on NOAA satellites.

“We’ve seen over the last three months an effort to essentially disassemble American enterprise, American government, American progress, by a group that knew everything about how they were going to do it and do it quickly,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), after he, Van Hollen, and Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) visited scientists and staff at Goddard. “But in this instance, and almost every instance they’ve undertaken, they do not know the consequences. And the consequences will be dire.”

None of the lawmakers gathered outside Goddard talked about risks to climate research specifically. But Van Hollen said that the Trump administration clearly was following the privatization playbook laid out in the conservative roadmap document known as Project 2025. Although Trump distanced himself from the document prior to the election, he chose one of its architects, Russell Vought, to head up OMB.

“The reason we have [the National Institutes of Health] to do basic medical research and we have places like Goddard to do this kind of research is because it is a public good, and there are a lot of people that want to later cash in on its benefits,” Van Hollen said. “We want to make sure the American people are the folks who are benefiting from this public investment.”

Ivey, who represents the district that includes the Goddard property, said many of the benefits of the research that takes place there are so long-term they would be lost if turned over to the private sector, which seeks a much quicker return on investment.

“Some of the private companies that they’re assuming would pick this up, their shareholders would never let them do it, because they wouldn’t be able to show a quarterly or yearly benefit necessarily,” Ivey said. “Some of the research takes decades to accomplish.”

When reached for comment on the memo, OMB Communications Director Rachel Cauley said, “No final funding decisions have been made.”

It will be up to Congress in the coming weeks to make the final decision on budget cuts, but a top priority of the Republican leadership is to reduce government spending in order to pay for an extension of the tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term as well as additional cuts. Nevertheless, Van Hollen and the other lawmakers expressed confidence that Congressional Republicans would not go along with the deep cuts being pushed by the White House.

“I believe that Republicans will recognize that a 50 percent cut to the NASA science budget is harmful to the national security and other interests of the United States,” Van Hollen said.

Cover photo:  Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) speaks at a press conference on March 26 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images