Months after Congress voted against the Trump administration’s brutal NASA budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, the White House has renewed its efforts to deal the space agency’s science directorate a devastating blow.

Earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its proposed 2027 top-line request, which would eviscerate NASA’s science budget by a whopping 47 percent and slash the agency’s overall funding by 23 percent. The move highlighted the Trump administration’s persistent and staunchly anti-science agenda, once again drawing outraged reactions from space advocacy groups.

Worse yet, as The Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier told Space.com, the latest document is incredibly vague, failing to identify which space science missions would land on the chopping block. It even refuses to list prior-year funding levels, a baffling departure from 60 years of institutional history.

“There are two things: the astonishing lack of transparency and the abject refusal to acknowledge political reality,” Dreier said. “This is the least transparent NASA budget request I’ve ever seen — and I’ve literally looked through every single one since 1960.”

Dreier also pointed out that the White House was allocating $438 million to “Mars Technology” without providing any further cost breakdowns.

The 2027 request also appears to largely ignore Congress’s insistence on keeping NASA well funded. Lawmakers resoundingly rejected the White House’s proposed 2026 budget, which Dreier described as an “extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States,” last year.

In other words, the Trump administration’s latest request comes off as a “copy-paste budget” from its last attempt, as Dreier told Space.com, calling it out as “sloppy and unprofessional.”

The document even includes egregious errors that could’ve easily been caught, with Dreier noting that it lists the Mars Sample Return mission as a line item even though it was canceled last year, and misstates the fiscal year for the funding of NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope.

While funding for future missions to the Moon including NASA’s signature Artemis program remains largely intact, space science — which relies on long-term public funding — could take a massive hit.

“It’s the essence of why we have public investment in basic science,” Dreier told Space.com. “Just because SpaceX is very good and launching rockets does not then mean that it’s now easy to get high quality science data at Mars.”

“The two activities are very different, but they often get conflated together,” he added.

Despite the errors and vagueness of the document, NASA’s leadership is firmly behind the Trump administration’s attempts to largely dismantle the agency’s science mission. Administrator Jared Isaacman defended the 2027 budget proposal, telling CBS News that the agency would still have enough resources to “get to the Moon.”

He also told CNN in a separate interview that “NASA’s science budget is greater than every other space agency combined across the world.”

“I strongly support the President’s fiscal policies and mandate to drive efficiency,” Isaacman wrote in an April 3 memo to NASA employees, as quoted by SpaceNews.

The fate of NASA is once again in the hands of lawmakers. Considering how its 2026 proposal fared, there’s a good chance a bipartisan group in Congress will once again strike down the White House’s request.

Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science chair Jerry Moran (R-KS) argued in a statement this week that it would be a “mistake” to gut funding for science missions.

“I’m going to try to lead the subcommittee and the whole committee to put us in a position where we are funding NASA, NOAA and our other agencies in a way that is pretty similar to what we did last year,” he said.

However, the upcoming midterm elections could soon complicate matters even further, delaying an almost guaranteed revision.

In short, the OMB’s latest budget request is seemingly little more than a clumsily constructed document designed to obstruct, not support, NASA’s operations, underlining the White House’s flagrant disregard for anything not related to sending astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

“Members of both parties understand that dismantling the US space science program is a short-sighted, wasteful, strategic blunder,” Dreier told Space.com.

More on NASA’s budget: The White House Is Still Desperately Trying to Slash NASA’s Budget