TOKYO — A Senate appropriations bill that rejected the administration’s proposed cuts to NASA is in limbo after a dispute among senators about an unrelated provision.
The Senate Appropriations Committee was set to formally approve a commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill during a July 10 markup session along with two other appropriations bills.
Senate appropriators follow an unusual process where they first vote on the bill itself, and only then consider amendments, the reverse of the standard procedure. Committee members initially voted 21-6 in favor of the bill, with the option to change their votes depending on the outcome of amendments.
That became an issue when the committee voted 15-14 in favor of an amendment by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), ranking member of the CJS subcommittee, that would prevent the administration from spending money set aside for a new headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for anything other than a previously approved plan, which called for a new facility in Greenbelt, Maryland. The White House and current FBI leadership has sought to scrap that plan in favor of moving into an existing building in Washington.
Later in the markup, Republican senators who had originally voted in favor of the bill changed their votes to no. The prompted Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the appropriations committee, to call an extended recess in an attempt to resolve the dispute. That recess is expected to extend into at least next week.
With the markup session not yet complete, the committee has not released the CJS bill and accompanying report. But members indicated during the hearing that the bill largely rejected the nearly 25% cut in overall NASA spending that the White House proposed in May.
“For NASA, the bill reflects an ambitious approach to space exploration, prioritizing the agency’s flagship program, Artemis, and rejecting premature terminations of systems like SLS and Orion, before commercial replacements are ready,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), chair of the CJS appropriations subcommittee. He added that the bill “protects key science missions.”
Van Hollen said the bill would provide $24.9 billion for NASA, slightly above the $24.875 billion that the agency received in 2025 and far more than the $18.8 billion that the administration offered in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal. That included $7.3 billion for NASA science programs, the same as fiscal year 2025.
“We rejected cuts that would have devastated NASA science by 47% and would have terminated 55 operating and planned missions,” he said.
The debate offered few other details about NASA or other science agency budgets included in the bill. Both Moran and Van Hollen said the bill rejected proposed cuts of more than 50% to the National Science Foundation, with Moran stating that the NSF budget would be cut by just $60 million, or less than 1%, from 2025.
Van Hollen added that the budget “maintains” plans for next-generation weather satellites at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an apparent reference to the GeoXO program that the White House sought to cut in both number of satellites and instruments on each satellite.
During the markup, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced an amendment that would have prevented NASA from spending any funds in the bill for moving the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to Houston. The budget reconciliation bill enacted last week included $85 million for a “space vehicle transfer” intended to facilitate such a move.
Durbin noted that the $85 million included is far short of estimates by NASA and the Smithsonian that such a move would cost more than $300 million, suggesting that agency funds might be tapped to cover the difference.
He withdrew the amendment, a common maneuver when members want to raise a point for further debate, but indicated he remained concerned about any such move. “I think we ought to think twice about this kind of approach,” he said. “This is not a transfer. It’s a heist.”
House concerns on 2025 spending plan
The House Appropriations Committee was previously scheduled to mark up its version of a CJS spending bill this week, but those plans were scrapped when House leadership canceled votes for the week of July 7. The committee has not yet rescheduled the CJS markup.
The ranking member of the House CJS appropriations subcommittee, Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), has raised issues about a lack of an operating plan, or detailed spending plan, for fiscal year 2025 for NASA.
In a July 10 letter to NASA’s new acting administrator, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Meng said that the operating plan that NASA submitted after passage of a full-year continuing resolution for fiscal year 2025 lacked the details required by the bill.
“NASA’s failure thus far to comply with the law raises concerns about its intentions with respect to certain missions – particularly those in the Science Mission Directorate for which the President’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal requests cancelation,” she wrote. “The absence of a spend plan also appears to be an attempt to avoid the question of whether NASA may seek large-scale reductions in force, beyond the multiple early retirement options provided to employees, as proposed in the budget request.”
Those concerns, she added, were amplified by comments made at a NASA employee town hall June 25 where Brian Hughes, NASA’s chief of staff, suggested that the agency might implement cuts in the 2026 budget proposal once the fiscal year starts Oct. 1, even before final passage of an appropriations bill. “If we were to wait for all of the congressional process to unfold and get to final resolution to make any movements or do anything, it would probably be considered irresponsible,” he said.
“Such a statement is itself irresponsible, and should be clarified immediately,” Meng wrote.