NASA officials are not scared of a possible funding cut by the Trump administration. They are confident that their work and achievements will speak for themselves.
Last November, The Guardian reported that NASA's Earth science division is expected to go through a funding cut. This is because the president-elect wants the agency to focus on deep space exploration instead of studying climate change.
His senior adviser, Stephen Miller, has said that Donald Trump is set in eliminating all climate change research done by NASA as part of the administration's efforts to crackdown "politicized science." It was revealed that the president-elect wants the focus to be on space exploration with the goal of being able to explore the whole solar system by the end of the century.
Donald Trump has continued to appoint climate change deniers to office. He has previously tweeted that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
According to The Christian Science Monitor, Thomas Zurbuchen, the leader of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, has said that the concerns over NASA's future under Donald Trump is just based on noise and "not signal." During the annual Earth Science Town Hall meeting at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco last month, he told leaders that they should be a "source of signal, not a source of noise."
Michael Freilich, NASA Earth Science Division director, noted that scientists should continue with their work even if the space agency's Earth science program is dropped. They should do even better instead of thinking about what could have been.
Zurbuchen added that scientists should continue to produce high-quality research. He reminded his colleagues that they should always do the right thing.
This is not the first time that NASA has experienced a budget cut. During the early years of George W. Bush's presidency, the space agency's overall budget was dropped from approximately 11 percent of its budget to six percent.
