NASA has canceled contracts and grants worth up to $420 million at the direction of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The cuts will affect research and education programs in the United States, NewScientist wrotereports.
The DOGE department, led by Elon Musk, announced the cuts, and NASA confirmed the amount but declined to specify which programs were being cut. Casey Dreyer of The Planetary Society compiled a list of affected projects using NASA’s open grant database, which the agency later removed.
Many of the canceled studies are related to climate science and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, which align with Donald Trump's political agenda. Among them are MIT's research on the effects of heat and pollution on prisons, and numerical flood models for indigenous lands. NASA also stopped supporting experiments with bioengineered cells to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body and projects related to moon dust.
NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens said the agency is “optimizing resources to align with DOGE initiatives.” But scientists are critical of the decision. Michael Battaglio of Yale University says politics shouldn’t dictate what research gets funded, while Bruce Jakoski of the University of Colorado is concerned about cuts to DEI programs that help underrepresented groups get an education.
NASA also stopped funding the National Society of Black Physicists conference, citing its compliance with Trump's DEI order. Society president Stephen Roberson plans to appeal the decision because the conference brings together scientists of all races and backgrounds.
NASA has not commented on the details of the cuts, and most affected organizations have not issued public statements. The exception is the San Diego Air and Space Museum, which, despite the changes at NASA, has not yet lost funding.
By the way, as part of US President Donald Trump's fight against the DEI program, the promise to deliver the first female astronaut, the first non-white astronaut, and the first representative of another country to the Moon also recently disappeared from NASA's website.