Bill Nye the Science Guy has criticized President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut funding for NASA, describing it as lazy and riddled with typos.
The Trump administration this month released its proposed President’s Budget for fiscal year 2027. While it boosts funding for the Artemis program following its mission around the moon, it also calls for a 23 percent overall cut to NASA’s budget and a 47 percent reduction to the agency’s science funding, dropping it from $7.25 billion to $3.9 billion.
Nye sharply condemned the reductions, calling them “a huge mistake.”
“NASA is the best brand the U.S. has. People around the world recognize NASA. The word science is in the Constitution. That’s what keeps the U.S. ahead,” he told NBC News on Monday.
“You cannot be a leader in space without being a leader in science. It’s just a mistake,” he added.
In response, Rachel Cauley, Communications Director for the White House Office of Management and Budget told the Daily Beast: “Bill Nye is a fake scientist” who “compared choosing biological sex to cartoon ice-cream flavors,” referecing a segment on the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World.
In the segment, different ice cream flavors were used to represent different sexual orientations to show that there are “lots of flavors to sexuality” and that attempts to force people to change—such as conversion therapy—are ineffective.
Cauley also said Nye “wrongly claimed Antarctica was disappearing because of the Green New Scam.” Nye’s comments, which he made to CNN, referred to Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, which scientists say could collapse in the next five years.
Nye holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University and began his career as an engineer before moving into television. He worked at Boeing and at Sundstrand Data Control in the Seattle area. During his time at Boeing, he developed a hydraulic resonance suppressor device that was later used on Boeing 747 aircraft.
The proposal follows an earlier attempt to reduce NASA’s budget by 18 percent, which was rejected by both chambers of Congress. Nye said he was present on Capitol Hill during that pushback and questioned why similar cuts have resurfaced.
“Members of Congress and their staff said the President’s Budget Request, the PBR, is dead on arrival, and they pushed back and overwhelmed that request. Why it’s happened again is not clear,” he said.
He also criticized the document’s quality, saying, “Objectively, this time, the President’s Budget Request is written—how would I describe—it’s much lazier,” Nye claimed. “There are typos; they refer to 2026 instead of 2027, and they left out some language arbitrarily. It’s sort of cut and paste without paying attention.”
The proposed budget would terminate funding for roughly 40 NASA missions and eliminate support for several programs focused on in-space sustainability and long-term operations.
In the budget document, those initiatives are described as “frivolous,” a characterization that has drawn criticism from the science community.
“This is a critical period for the U.S. space agency to execute on the ambitious plans to lead the world in science, exploration, and innovation. The Artemis II crew is en route to the moon, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is undergoing final integration before launch later this year, Dragonfly and the asteroid-hunting NEO Surveyor projects are progressing toward launch. The OMB proposal undermines those efforts by adding needless uncertainty and disruption to NASA’s workforce,” The Planetary Society said in a statement.
GOP Senator Jerry Moran has also criticized the proposed cuts, warning that it would be a “mistake” to fund exploration while gutting funding for science missions.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has defended the administration’s 2027 budget request, telling employees in an internal message obtained by POLITICO that the proposed funding levels would be adequate for the agency to carry out its core responsibilities.
In the note, Isaacman wrote that the “requested funding levels are sufficient for NASA to meet the nation’s high expectations and deliver on all mission priorities.”
