NASA’s budget is still an unfathomable mess. The government shutdown late last year once again delayed proceedings to determine the space agency’s future — but if it were up to the Trump administration, NASA’s science budget would be slashed in half, an “extinction-level” inflection point for US space exploration and science.
If Congress were to have its druthers, on the other hand, NASA’s budget would largely remain unchanged, securing the future of dozens of important missions — both ongoing and planned — that the White House is looking to place on the chopping block.
Trapped between the two, the fate of the space agency remains in the air. Congress passed a short-term resolution on November 12 that left the government until January 31 to ratify NASA’s budget. NASA’s recently sworn-in administrator and former SpaceX space tourist, Jared Isaacman, has yet to officially comment on the matter, though he’s made it clear that he’s aligned with the Trump administration’s tripling down on private industry-led space exploration.
As uncertainty and confusion prevail, though, the Trump administration has taken it upon itself to gut entire buildings at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC), which played a key role in the development of its groundbreaking James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, alongside countless other key missions.
This week, news emerged that the Trump administration is even shutting down the center’s library — NASA’s largest — and threatening to destroy an undetermined number of books, documents, and journals in the process.
As the New York Times reports, many of these invaluable artifacts haven’t been digitized or made available elsewhere. While a NASA spokesperson told the newspaper that the agency will review what to keep and what to throw away over the next 60 days, it’s a sobering glimpse at a federal agency in crisis.
After the NYT story ran, the agency’s freshly-minted administrator Jared Isaacman pushed back against its claims.
“The [NYT] story does not fully reflect the context NASA shared,” he wrote on X. “At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines.”
That claim seems to contradict the NYT, which reported that a NASA spokesman named Jacob Richmond had told it that the agency would “review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.”
NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens, meanwhile, described the initiative as a “consolidation, not a closure,” saying the Trump administration is looking to close 13 buildings and more than 100 labs across the GSFC campus by March.
Stevens claimed the latest moves are part of a master plan reorganization effort that was first devised in 2022, several years before president Donald Trump took office. Per the NYT, seven other NASA libraries have already been shuttered since 2022. Three of them were closed in 2025.
In November, NASA staffers raised concerns over word that over a dozen buildings on the GSFC campus were being emptied without notice. It’s not just books and important documents on the line; the staffers warned that highly specialized equipment was at risk of being thrown away like trash as well.
Lawmakers have been furious at the Trump administration’s handling of the situation.
“The Trump Administration has spent the last year attacking NASA Goddard and its workforce and threatening our efforts to explore space, deepen our understanding of Earth, and spur technological advancements that make our economy stronger and nation safer,” senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MA) told the NYT. “These reports of closures at Goddard are deeply concerning — I will continue to push back on any actions that impact Goddard’s critical mission.”
The GSFC library contains important documentation about our efforts to study the cosmos, dating back to the Apollo era over half a century ago.
Critics of the moves to gut the campus argue it would be reckless to abandon these documents.
“It’s not like we’re so much smarter now than we were in the past,” planetary scientist Dave Williams, who took NASA up on its offer for an early retirement last year, told the NYT. “It’s the same people, and they make the same kind of human errors. If you lose that history, you are going to make the same mistakes again.”
Updated with additional context from NASA.
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