Nature reports:

A key US Senate committee has indicated that it will reject the massive budget cuts that President Donald Trump proposed for some science agencies, including the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA. The US Senate Committee on Appropriations was prepared to vote today to advance a bill laying out fiscal year 2026 funding for science. However, the senators came to an impasse on an unrelated matter — the location for the new headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — and the committee went into a recess for an unknown length of time.

But the hearing today was the first hint that the US Congress, which controls government spending, might ignore Trump’s wishes.

If enacted, Trump’s proposal would have a devastating effect on US science; earlier this week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released an analysis suggesting that the proposal would cut all federally-funded basic research by one-third. Scientists, advocacy groups and lobbyists have been pleading with members of Congress in the past several weeks to protect funding for research agencies. The campaign appears to be working: under the Senate committee’s bill, the NSF budget would drop by only 0.67%, rather than by 57% as Trump requested, and many NASA space and Earth-science missions would continue rather than being shut down. “This bill protects key science missions,” Jerry Moran, a Republican senator from Kansas, said at the meeting. [Continue reading…]