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Commentary: Exploring the moon while cutting NASA? Why Trump’s 2027 budget misfires
Trump’s budget proposal takes aim at programs that make Americans smarter, healthier and safer. What’s his real agenda?
The oldest, most enduring cliche about government policy is the one about how budgets are political, not fiscal, documents.
The Trump administration’s budget proposal for the 2027-28 fiscal year, unveiled Friday, seems designed to set a new standard for partisan ideology as a spending standard.
You may have seen news coverage of the budget’s top lines, which call for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year and cuts totaling $73 billion in nondefense spending. But those figures fail to communicate the raw flavor of the budget cuts or how they’re described in the 92-page document.
It’s an extinction-level event for science.
— Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on budget cuts at NASA
Nor do they provide perspective for the magnitude of the defense increase or the damage that would be wreaked upon crucial social programs.
The defense request, for instance, would be a 42% increase over the current year, but it might be better judged as what Todd Harrison of the pro-business American Enterprise Institute describes unhappily as “the highest level of funding for defense in US history, surpassing even the peak funding during World War II.”
Adjusted to today’s dollars, Harrison calculates, the World War II peak was a bit lower than $1.2 trillion.
The administration minimizes the overall budgetary effect of its spending plans by projecting average growth in gross national product at 3% annually over the next decade.
That’s an ambitious goal, to say the least. Over the last 25 years — that is, in this century — U.S. economic growth has reached or exceeded 3% in only three years, including a pandemic-era surge to 6.1% in 2021. Last year it was only 2.1%.
On the other side of the ledger, the nondefense budget would be cut by 10%. But programs the White House has specifically targeted for being contrary to its ideology would suffer far more devastating cuts. Some scientific programs, such those concerned with global warming or the social and economic implications of science, technology and healthcare policies would be slashed by more than 50%.
NASA may be enjoying a moment just now, as its Artemis II spacecraft rounded the far side of the moon Monday, preparatory to heading back to Earth in the first moonshot since Apollo 17 last landed men on the lunar surface in December 1972.
But Trump proposes slashing the agency’s budget by $5.6 billion, or 23%. It gets worse: Trump would cut NASA’s science division by $34 billion, or 47%, canceling more than 40 projects, of which about 20 are currently underway.
“It’s an extinction-level event for science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, told Nature.
Among the programs facing extinction is NASA’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Engagement, which aimed to interest minority students in those so-called STEM disciplines.
“NASA will inspire the next generation of explorers through exciting, ambitious space missions,” the budget says, “not through subsidizing woke STEM programming and research that prioritizes some groups of students over others.”
The budget leaves unclear how those “exciting, ambitious space missions” will come to pass, since it also cuts $297 million from NASA’s annual spending on space technology.
The proposed cuts to science programs more generally would be devastating. The National Science Foundation, one of the most important scientific grant-making agencies in the world, would lose $4.8 billion, or 55% of its funding.
The language the budget uses to rationalize such cuts speaks volumes about the drivers of its draconian cuts in nondefense spending: It’s an expression of Trumpian culture war hobby horses such as hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The term “woke” or its derivatives appear 32 times in the budget document — as many times as it appears in Project 2025, the far-right roadmap for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023.
The $8.5 billion in proposed budget cuts to K-12 spending would include the elimination of the $70-million Teacher Quality Partnership, which the budget describes as a program to “train teachers … on divisive ideologies.”
Among those, the budget says, are “inappropriate and divisive topics such as Critical Race Theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, social justice activism,” and “anti-racism.” Nothing in the document explains why any of those things are considered bad; the terms are merely shibboleths that Trump’s core audience is expected to accept as gospel.
Services for transgender individuals would take a major hit from the budget: Among the $204.5 million in Treasury Department funding for community development initiatives on the chopping block would be support for “gender extremism,” such as for clinics that provide “‘gender-affirming hormone therapy’ and other services to young patients.”
As I’ve reported, Trump has bought heavily into conservative attacks on gender-affirming care, including by spouting claims that I labeled in 2024 as “deranged and despicable,” such as that schoolchildren are being kidnapped by school administrators and subjected to surgery against their will.
Perhaps the most concentrated assault in the proposed budget, as my colleague Hayley Smith reported, is the one aimed at research, development, and construction of renewable energy sources. The budget plan contains no fewer than 20 references to what it calls the “green new scam.”
This is an infantile reference to what’s typically known as the “Green New Deal,” a raft of policies incorporating a transition from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal to renewables as well as the concept of “environmental justice,” meaning efforts to ensure that the transition doesn’t overly burden disadvantaged communities.
Trump has consistently called for more development of fossil sources, including a revival of coal despite its unrelenting and inevitable glide path toward extinction as a component of U.S. energy generation. The budget plan doubles down on this policy, calling renewables R&D a “leftist” ideology. This is tied to policies “opening up more Federal land and waters for oil, gas, and clean coal development,” the document says. (“Clean coal,” which is to say nonpolluting coal, is a myth, as I’ve reported.)
The budget plan pays tribute to another Trump obsession, the supposed evils of wind power. Cuts to the Interior Department budget would “put a stop to disastrous offshore wind energy projects that harm hardworking coastal communities, precious wildlife, and American military readiness.” None of these assertions about wind power is supported by reality.
Some cuts appear to reflect a determination to exact retribution from agencies that have thwarted cherished conservative goals. The National Institutes of Health, a consistent target of conservative budget-cutters, would lose $5.9 billion, or 12.5% of its budget. That would include major cuts to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was formerly headed by the respected immunologist Anthony Fauci.
The budget drafters couldn’t resist taking a swipe at Fauci, who has been the target of smears from Republicans who have tried to blame him, absurdly, for the COVID pandemic. The budget document accuses Fauci of steering government funds to the Wuhan (China) Institute of Virology, which it called “the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
There’s no compelling evidence that a laboratory was a source of the virus, as I’ve documented: The overwhelming weight of scientific judgment is that the virus reached humans from natural zoologic sources. The budget plan resurrects the long-debunked conspiracy theory that Fauci orchestrated a 2020 scientific paper that judged the lab-leak theory to be “improbable.” The budget drafters assert that Fauci (who retired in 2022) “commissioned” the paper, which is simply untrue.
Another theme percolating through the budget plan is the need to protect our wealthiest taxpayers from, well, taxes. The budget would cut $1.4 billion from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service, reversing a restoration of the agency’s enforcement capabilities undertaken during the Biden administration. Trump cut IRS staffing by 20,000, or 27%. The document asserts that the IRS “has been weaponized against the American people, small businesses, and non-profit organizations.”
According to the Yale Budget Lab, every dollar the IRS spends on audits yields more than $7 in returns. Plainly that’s not coming from average Americans, but from the upper crust.
None of this means that the budget proposal isn’t valuable, to an extent. It’s a convenient one-stop window into Trump’s personal fixations: the elimination of “radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans,” the horrors of “the globalist climate agenda,” the “invasion” of violent criminals from abroad, and so on. In other words, there’s nothing new under the Trumpian sun.
President Trump on Thursday announced that grocery stories and air conditioning companies will be allowed to keep using high-polluting refrigerants for longer than they would have under a law he signed during his first administration.
“This was a tremendous burden, a tremendous cost,” said Trump, surrounded in the Oval Office by executives from supermarket chains including Kroger, Fairway, Neimann Foods and Piggly Wiggly. “It was making the equipment unaffordable, and the actual benefit was nothing.”
The move loosens rules meant to restrict hydroflourocarbons, a class of climate-damaging chemicals used in cooling equipment. HFCs are known as “super pollutants” because their impact on climate change can be tens of thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide during their shorter lifespans.
In the move Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency extends the deadline for companies to comply with a 2023 rule transitioning refrigerators and air conditioners off HFCs and onto new cooling technologies. Reducing these chemicals and moving to cleaner refrigerants has long been a bipartisan issue.
Trump is also proposing exemptions from a rule requiring leak repairs on large-scale refrigeration systems.
The administration framed the changes as part of its effort to bring down high grocery costs. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the actions will save $2.4 billion for Americans and safeguard 350,000 jobs.
“Americans who wanted to be able to fix their equipment were instead being required to buy far more costly new equipment and that just doesn’t make any sense,” said Zeldin.
David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the move will not only harm the climate, but U.S. competitiveness in global refrigerant markets as well.
“The EPA is catering to a small group of straggling companies by derailing the shift away from these climate super-pollutants,” he said. “The industry at large supports the HFC phasedown and has already invested in making new refrigerants and equipment, currently installed in thousands of stores.”
Danielle Wright, executive director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council, an environmental nonprofit, said any perceived near-term savings from the rollbacks will be outweighed by the future costs.
“Business owners are far more worried about the escalating cost of keeping aging, high‑global-warming-potential equipment running than they are about the cost of installing new, compliant systems,” she said.
Trump dismissed the climate concerns, saying his changes “are not going to have any impact on the environment.”
He said he wants to get rid of the technology transition rule entirely in the future.
Airbnb unveiled a new set of services for guests on Wednesday, adding car rentals, airport pickup and grocery delivery to its online marketplace that connects travelers with local hosts.
Customers can now get groceries delivered to their Airbnb through a partnership with Instacart and have a driver meet them at the airport with Airbnb’s Welcome Pickups. The app is also offering luggage storage in partnership with Bounce and will add in-app car rentals later this summer.
At the same time, Airbnb is ramping up its use of AI by adding AI-powered review summaries and lodging comparisons, the company said.
The company has been expanding beyond lodging since last year, when it introduced Airbnb Experiences and Services, giving guests the option to book private tours and chef-cooked meals through the app.
In an earnings call earlier this month, the company’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, said the company is at “the very, very beginning of how AI is going to change how we all do our jobs.”
The changes are coming in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will take place in 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The company said its offering exclusive World Cup experiences, such as watch parties and access to stadiums.
“In terms of what we’ve seen in cumulative bookings heading into the event, the World Cup is slated to be the largest event in Airbnb’s history,” said the company’s chief financial officer, Ellie Mertz, on the earnings call.
Airbnb gained popularity for offering travelers unique and homey stays on other people’s property, but it added boutique hotel bookings to its platform late last year. The move had some customers questioning if the app was straying too far from its original purpose.
In its announcement this week, the company said it is partnering with more independent hotels in 20 top destinations, including New York, London and Singapore. On the earnings call, Chesky said hotels on Airbnb could become a multibillion-dollar revenue business.
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2007 and gave homeowners the opportunity to earn money by renting out their space to travelers seeking something different from a hotel. Airbnb bookings can range from private bedrooms in a shared home to luxury mansions and yachts.
The company’s revenue grew 18% year over year to $2.7 billion in the first quarter, while net income increased slightly to $160 million. Airbnb’s new services and offerings could transform it from a home-sharing platform to a holistic travel marketplace, analysts said.
Shares of the company have increased by 14% over the past six months and fell by less than 1% on Thursday.
Elon Musk wants to take investors on a ride to the moon — and beyond.
His pioneering rocket company SpaceX filed Wednesday for what’s expected to be the largest initial public offering in history, potentially raising at least $75 billion and valuing the company at as much as $2 trillion.
The registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an expected public offering next month explicitly sets aside stocks for retail investors, though the exact number will be spelled out in a later filing, as will the offering price and company valuation.
Interest in the stock offering is expected to be high despite the billionaire’s controversial politics, including his involvement last year with the Department of Government Efficiency, the makeshift cost-cutting effort that resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of government jobs.
“Potential investors are probably just as polarized as the electorate is too, given his dabbling in politics,” said Carol Schleif, chief market strategist for BMO Private Wealth. “But it’s not just the SpaceX IPO per se, it’s a bigger, broader excitement among investors for space investment in general.”
Investor interest was piqued by the Artemis II moon mission this year that SpaceX did not participate in, she said. However, the company is expected to play a larger role in future missions that take astronauts to the moon..
Ultimately, Musk, 54, wants to establish a colony on Mars but those plans have been set on the back burner, with NASA now focusing on moon missions.
Musk will remain the company’s chief executive and chairman. Under a dual-class stock structure as a holder of special Class B shares he will be able to control the election of directors, the filing says.
The IPO is expected to be at least twice as large as the current record holder: Saudi Aramco, the state-controlled national oil and gas company of Saudi Arabia, which raised nearly $30 billion in 2019.
Nearly two dozen banks will be underwriting the IPO and offering shares to investors, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Founded in 2002 in El Segundo, SpaceX has revolutionized the aerospace industry by developing the reusable Falcon 9 rocket that has radically lowered launch costs.
The company moved its headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas in 2024. However, SpaceX retains large operations in the South Bay city and blasts off regularly from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Scores of former SpaceX employees have launched startups in Southern California, including rocket company Relativity Space, hypersonic missile startup Castelion and satellite manufacturer Apex Space.
Since developing its reusable rocket technology, SpaceX has established its Starlink network as the leading satellite-based broadband internet service. It also is moving into satellite-based cellular service and this year merged with Musk’s xAi artificial intelligence company that also included his X social network.
Marco Cáceres, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group, said that the advantage of going public for SpaceX lies in the IPO’s ability to raise a large amount of capital quickly to complete development of its Starship rocket.
“It is going to dominate the market even more than the Falcon 9 is dominating the market now,” he said. “That’s going to be ultimately what’s going to drive their business for the next 10 years.”
The 12th test launch of Starship is set for Friday from the company’s south Texas launch facility. The rocket is the third version of craft, standing more than 400 feet tall and with about three times the payload of the second version.
The regulatory filing claims that the market for its rocket, internet and mobile telephone businesses could be as large as $28.5 trillion.
SpaceX also plans to launch thousands of orbiting data centers powered by the sun that would perform AI calculations.
With the company making massive capital investments, it recorded a $4.28-billion loss in the first quarter. Last year, it recorded $18.7 billion in revenue and lost $4.94 billion, according to the filing.
The public offering is expected to hit the market next month after a “road show,” during which SpaceX will seek to drum up interest from institutional and retail investors.
It will arrive after a fairly quiet year for IPOs that was brightened last week when Cerebras Systems, a Sunnyvale company that makes semiconductors for AI supercomputers, went public.
Shares at Cerebras were offered at $185 and jumped 68% on its opening day. They closed Wednesday at $290.69.
Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said the SpaceX offering would dwarf that of Cerebras, as it is expected to raise more than every IPO combined in the last two years.
“A win here or a loss could really impact the IPO market,” he said. “The sheer size of this deal is going to make or lose fortunes.”
Among the oddest disclosures of the IPO is a decision by the company’s board in January to grant Musk 1 billion Class B shares if the company reaches a certain market capitalization and establishes a “permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
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