On January 8 the House voted 397-28 to pass this “minibus,” which then was transmitted to the Senate. On January 12 the Senate voted 80-13 to “invoke cloture” on the bill, limiting further debate to a maximum of 30 hours, after which a vote on the Bill is required. At the time of writing, the Senate has yet to conduct a floor vote on the package; if the Senate indeed passes the measure, it proceeds to the President for signature into law.
The CJS Bill addresses funding for a number of science agencies, including NASA, NSF, and NOAA. In the table below, we show some NASA and NSF numbers as illustrative examples. It is evident that very significant changes have been made on the funding levels for NASA Science (and Heliophysics in particular) and at the NSF, since the rather dire prospects associated with the funding levels requested in the FY 2026 President’s Budget Request that was released in May 2025.
| FY 25 Enacted | PBR
(May 2025) |
House CJS
(July 2025) |
Senate CJS
(July 2025) |
Conference Agreement (January 2026) | ||
| NASA | Science | $7,334 M | $3,908 M | $6,000 M | $7,300 M | $7,250 M |
| Heliophysics | $805 M | $432 M | $625 M | $887 M | $875 M | |
| NSF | Research & Related Activities | $7,180 M | $3,276 M | $6,373 M | $7,177 M | $7,177 M |
Within each line, the Bill also allocates funding for certain specific items. For example, in NASA Heliophysics, the Bill includes $25M for Parker Solar Probe, $100M for development of the decadal-priority Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission, and $109.5M for the HelioSwarm mission. For the NSF it includes $285M for the Graduate Fellowship Program.
Over the course of the few months since the PBR was released, many SPD members have actively participated in a series of advocacy efforts, including a day-long congressional visit in June involving several dozen people, and I believe that the impact of these efforts is reflected in the trends in the table above. On behalf of the SPD Public Policy Committee, I would like to take the opportunity to record my appreciation for all these efforts. I also call upon the community to take one further step: call or write your congressional delegation* and thank them for their efforts to maintain a robust level of federal support for the important research that we do.
*If you want to verify how your Representative voted on the minibus package, the record is at https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/20267?BillNum=hr6938.