Congress Crushes Hopes for NASA Reform

When Donald Trump returned for his second stint in the White House, advocates for NASA reform were optimistic. In particular, they hoped the president’s team would end the notoriously expensive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program and allow the space agency to rely instead on the more affordable rockets flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other private companies. That was the policy advised by many space experts, including Jared Isaacman, the administration’s reform-minded nominee to be NASA Administrator. (It was also the approach I recommended in my April 2025 Manhattan Institute report, “U.S. Space Policy: The Next Frontier.”) These observers hoped a more mission-focused NASA—freed from the SLS program’s obscene costs and delays—could finally deliver on long-promised plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and ultimately send them to Mars.

Today, less than six months into Trump’s second term, those hopes are dashed. Tucked among its hundreds of measures, the Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump last week includes a kind of poison pill for NASA reform. The bill allocates an extra $10 billion for SLS and related programs and stipulates that the rocket must be used for at least four more missions, a timeline that will take NASA years to achieve. Hopes for a leaner, more effective space agency will have to wait.

This setback comes after two other blows to the U.S. civilian space program. In late May, the White House withdrew Isaacman’s nomination in a show of political pique, just as the notorious feud between Trump and his one-time advisor Musk kicked off, and days before Isaacman was almost certain to have been confirmed. (Musk had recommended Isaacman for the NASA post.) That move leaves the agency rudderless as it grapples with a second challenge: the White House Office of Management and Budget is pushing NASA to implement a proposed budget that slashes NASA funding by roughly 25 percent and calls for the cancellation of more than 50 planned or ongoing unmanned science missions.

These recent moves have left space advocates reeling. Reformers both inside and outside NASA had hoped to see the new administration refocus the agency on its core missions, cut pork-barrel spending, and restore a sense of urgency. In my report, I wrote that the second Trump administration had a “golden opportunity” to restore U.S. leadership in space. Instead, NASA today is leaderless and drifting, even as China surges ahead with efforts to land its taikonauts on the moon and outpace the U.S. in space exploration.

The combination of OMB-driven budget cuts and congressionally mandated spending on SLS is especially pernicious. Retiring SLS would have enabled NASA to save billions each year, freeing up the funds needed to return astronauts to the moon and keep America’s space probes operating. The de facto current plan instead forces the agency to spend more money on the infamously wasteful SLS program, while gutting its highly successful science missions.

How did the momentum toward NASA reform evaporate so quickly? Two factors stand out: first, a lack of White House focus; and second, Capitol Hill’s perennial addiction to NASA pork. During his first term, President Trump put space policy in the hands of Vice President Mike Pence, a lifelong space buff who helped refocus NASA on returning U.S. astronauts to the moon and supported broader use of public-private partnerships between the agency and commercial space ventures. Trump White House 2.0 seems to have little interest in space policies associated with the now excommunicated Pence. For a time, Musk stepped into that void, recommending Isaacman and urging the administration to end the SLS project. (Obviously, Musk had a personal interest in a policy shift that would deepen NASA’s reliance on SpaceX, but that didn’t make him wrong; flying astronauts on SpaceX rockets saves U.S. taxpayers billions yearly.)

With Musk and Isaacman now both gone, there is no one to spearhead space policy or advocate in defense of NASA’s successful programs. And the administration shows no urgency in naming another nominee to lead the agency. At a recent internal town hall with NASA employees, the agency’s chief of staff, Brian Hughes, a Trump appointee, said that it was “hard to imagine” a new administrator would be nominated “before the next six months,” if not longer.

“No one in the administration is paying much attention to NASA other than OMB,” space analyst Rand Simberg tells City Journal. “And OMB is too ignorant about the strategic issues to do anything sensible.” In Trump’s second inaugural address, he spoke boldly about sending U.S. astronauts “to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” That epic goal may have reflected his brief friendship with Musk more than any deeply held personal ambition. Since Musk’s departure, “space issues seem to have fallen far down Trump’s list of priorities,” notes Ars Technica reporter Stephen Clark.

Congress, on the other hand, rarely misses an opportunity to micromanage NASA on behalf of powerful lawmakers’ states or districts. Since the end of the Apollo project in 1972, Congress has pushed the agency to build expensive space hardware and maintain enormous workforces in key states. The costly, unreliable space shuttle was one product of this policy priority. SLS is another. As long as the money keeps flowing, Congress shows little interest in whether NASA’s rockets are affordable or even able to fly frequently enough to achieve our goals in space.

Fed up with this ponderous approach, a few NASA leaders began looking for a different approach two decades ago. They proposed paying private companies fixed fees to fly cargo (and, eventually, astronauts) using their own space vehicles. Largely due to innovations developed by SpaceX, NASA’s commercial-space program has been a huge success, saving taxpayers billions. Predictably, lawmakers—especially from leading space-industry states such as Florida and Texas—fought it every step of the way. They insisted that NASA also build its own Apollo-style mega-rocket working with Boeing and other politically powerful aerospace contractors. The resulting rocket—which critics dubbed the “Senate Launch System”—is not only wildly over budget but built using obsolete, space-shuttle-era technology. NASA’s inspector general estimates that each flight of the behemoth will cost more than $4 billion, a cost that makes routine launches impossible. Space analyst Casey Handmer calls the program “a national disgrace.”

When Trump took office earlier this year, the consensus was growing that NASA could achieve grander goals, on leaner budgets, by ending the SLS program and relying solely on commercial partners to get our astronauts into orbit and beyond. For many analysts, the question wasn’t whether to retire SLS, but how soon. Currently, SLS is the backbone of the Artemis program that aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon. The rocket (and conjoined Orion capsule) flew a single, uncrewed test flight in 2022. The Artemis II mission aims to send four astronauts looping around the moon next year. Artemis III is (unrealistically) scheduled to put U.S. boots on lunar soil in 2027. Later planned missions would begin building a lunar base and construct the Lunar Gateway, a small space station orbiting the moon. (SLS critics generally oppose the Gateway as well, both because it isn’t crucial to lunar exploration and because launching its heavy components will require costly upgrades to the SLS rocket and an expensive new launch tower.)

Some experts advise scrapping SLS immediately and pushing SpaceX and other vendors to come up with alternate ways to facilitate lunar missions. In his nomination hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Isaacman suggested a compromise approach: using the two existing SLS rockets to fly Artemis missions II and III as planned, but pivoting entirely to commercial suppliers once American boots have touched the lunar surface again. The SLS rocket is not “the long-term way to get to and from the moon and Mars with great frequency,” he told the somewhat skeptical senators, including committee chairman Ted Cruz of Texas.

For a time, the White House was on the same page. Earlier this year it released a “skinny” budget plan for fiscal year 2026 that would cancel SLS and the Lunar Gateway after the Artemis III mission. SLS could be replaced “with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the document stated. But with Musk out of the picture and the White House preoccupied with other matters, the program’s backers in Congress apparently saw an opening to guarantee SLS funding for years to come. In language proposed by Senator Cruz, the budget bill stipulates that, out of the additional $10 billion allocated, $2.6 billion should go to building Gateway, while $4.1 billion is to be spent building two new SLS rockets.

The senator’s legislative directive described the spending as necessary to “win the new space race with China and ensure America dominates space.” Cruz and his pro-SLS colleagues appear sincerely to believe that SLS remains the best vehicle to get Americans back to the moon and support eventual missions to Mars. Critics respond that, given the rocket’s enormous costs and painfully slow launch rate, forcing NASA to stick with the flawed SLS platform will dramatically slow the pace of exploration. Privately built launch systems would be capable of conducting these missions both more cheaply and at a much higher frequency. But SLS backers on Capitol Hill have won that debate for now. As a result, NASA is now caught between the conflicting priorities of Congress and the White House: in a worst-of-both-worlds scenario, the agency will be required to press ahead with its most wasteful program even as the OMB forces it to slash its highly effective science missions.

“For the past 50 years, NASA has been held back by its attempts to develop human spaceflight systems that cost too much and fly to little,” my space-policy report noted. For almost as long, reformers both inside and outside the agency have been trying to fix that broken system. For a brief moment, it appeared that the Trump White House was ready to set NASA on a more sustainable path, one that would make possible a bold new era of space exploration. Instead, Congress has stepped into the leadership vacuum and opted once more for the business-as-usual approach. We might need to wait for another administration before real NASA reform is on the agenda again.

Top Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images