Trump wants to go to the moon, but he's sending NASA to the dump

In his inauguration address, President Donald Trump made a bold—and clunky—promise to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Of course, none of this is new: Trump has been yapping about landing on the moon since at least 2017, when he pressed NASA to return to the lunar surface.

But now Trump’s dream of taking credit for a manned landing on a celestial body appears to be slipping out of his grasp. 

On Wednesday, Politico reported that over 2,100 senior NASA officials are set to leave after a push by higher-ups. Those exiting include many in the agency’s human space flight division. And those departures are likely just the beginning. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal includes slashing NASA’s budget by 25% and cutting another 5,000 employees. 

Far from the golden age of space exploration he promised in January, experts now worry that Trump’s funding and staff cuts could cede American space leadership to a rising China. The risk is so great that every living former NASA administrator joined forces to warn that the new budget could permanently hobble the nation’s space program. 

Trump’s actions, both proposed and enacted, are helping to hollow out NASA by boosting brain drain, slashing budgets, and saddling the agency with interim leaders who care more about battling “wokeness” than they do about scientific research and space exploration. As always, his own voters will be the ones who pay the price.

In Florida, NASA spending supported over 35,500 direct and indirect jobs and more than $8 billion in economic activity in the government’s 2023 fiscal year. Economists now estimate Trump’s proposed cuts will slash those numbers. Of course, Trump won Florida by 13 percentage points in last year’s presidential election. 

Trump’s self-defeating cuts to NASA are just the latest in a series of policy decisions that are baffling even his key allies. In an April op-ed for RealClear

Science, MAGA blowhard Newt Gingrich called Trump’s decision to gut NASA “mindless,” arguing that, if enacted, Trump’s cuts would be “the end of America’s leadership in space science.” 

“There are many opportunities to reform NASA without sacrificing science research,” he wrote.

But the quality of America’s scientific research is hardly a concern for the thoughtless Republican lawmakers tasked with shuffling Trump’s half-baked ideas through Congress. They’ll willingly vote for legislation that devastates their own constituents, as voters saw recently in their eagerness to gut Medicaid.

Other Republicans who once loudly pushed for a strong NASA are now silent in the face of Trump’s sweeping cuts. In April, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned in a post on X that a“ moon mission MUST happen in President Trump’s term or else China will beat us there and build the first moonbase.” 

Daily Kos reached out to Cruz’s office to ask if he still feels confident in NASA’s ability to deliver a moon landing. As of publication time, his office hasn’t responded. 

That’s probably smart. With thousands of NASA employees leaving or being forced out, and the White House openly threatening Elon Musk and SpaceX, it’s unclear how Cruz intends to get anyone to the moon any time soon. He might want to check on that. As of 2023, NASA supported nearly 42,000 jobs in the state and had an economic impact there of over $9 billion, according to the agency. It makes sense given that Houston is the site of Johnson Space Center, one of NASA’s major field centers.

There’s another big problem roiling NASA: It has no real leader. The agency has been without a Senate-confirmed NASA administrator since Trump took office in January. Late last year, Trump announced he would nominate Jared Isaacman, a billionaire ally of Musk, to lead the agency.

But Trump pulled Isaacman’s nomination in May, days before it was set to be voted on in the Senate—and around the time of his falling-out with Musk.

Since January, Trump has gotten by with acting administrators. First was Janet Petro, whose defining achievement was eliminating NASA’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But on Thursday, Trump pulled his nominee for the spot and said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, an alumnus of MTV’s “Road Rules,” will be the new acting head, replacing Petro.

Of course, fittingly for the Trump administration, Duffy has no relevant experience to lead NASA.