Stories the budget tells

The FY2027 President's Budget Request proposes a NASA Total of … — down from the FY2026 enacted level of …. The cuts are not even across the agency:

Each figure is carried exactly as published, neutrally. The full account-and-directorate view is on the appropriations page.

Alongside the discretionary request sits a separate, MANDATORY program almost never read correctly. Section 40005 of the Working Families Tax Cut Act (P.L. 119-21) provided … in special mandatory appropriations, available through FY2032, for Mars, Artemis, and Moon-to-Mars.

The full WFTC breakdown — planned obligations by year and by area — is on the appropriations page.

On books that span multiyear flight programs and a global contractor base, NASA has earned a clean audit opinion on its financial statements every year for well over a decade.

The agency has posted a multi-year streak of clean opinions on its financial statements. What GAO continues to flag is a different thing: NASA's acquisition management has been on the High-Risk List since 1990 — the cost and schedule of building one-of-a-kind spacecraft, not the integrity of the accounting.

In its most recent assessment GAO reviewed about $74B of NASA major-project investment and found ongoing cost overruns and schedule delays. The audited past and the delivery risk are different things — and the monitor keeps them apart. The full record is on the audit page.

NASA's post-Apollo arc is a long plateau. OMB's Historical Tables carry agency budget authority since FY1976 — the table's first year. NASA was created in 1958, so the Apollo-era peak, far larger in real terms, is before this table and is not shown.

The series is nominal: OMB's Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one. See the full arc on the history page.