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Fact check: Is NASA's budget less than 2 percent of the federal budget?
- Pluto photographed by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015.
October 30, 2015
By Charles Aull
Donna Edwards of Maryland (D) said in an interview on C-SPAN earlier this month, "all of NASA's budget only accounts for, I think, less than 2 percent of our entire federal budget."
Given the amount of publicity that NASA has received in the past few months for its recent accomplishments—the discovery of flowing water on Mars and New Horizons' flyby of Pluto—we found Edwards' statement to be an intriguing one and wondered if it was true.
It is. In fact, NASA's 2015 budget is estimated to be slightly less than half-a-percent of the federal budget as a whole, and it hasn't accounted for more than two percent of the budget since 1969.
Background
Edwards, a fifth-term House Democrat who announced a bid for a U.S. Senate seat in March, made the statement in response to comments from a caller in a C-SPAN interview that aired on October 15. Shortly before the viewer called in, Edwards, who currently serves as the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Space, had briefly discussed with C-SPAN host Steve Scully her thoughts on NASA's Mars program. The caller noted, "This Mars that you're talking about, we're $18-19 trillion in debt, and you want to spend billions of dollars going to Mars, and millions and millions miles away, and you'll never do anything with it if you ever do get there."
The caller's comment reflects concerns that others have raised about NASA's budget in the past. In 2013, for example, Peter Roff, a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, criticized NASA's plans to capture an asteroid, saying, "If the economy were growing at a healthy rate, say 4 percent per year, then maybe such an experiment could be justified. ... The money is just not there for such flights of fancy."
Edwards responded to the C-SPAN caller by saying, "Over the last five decades, our investments in science have redounded to the benefit of the American economy, and I think that should continue. I think we're an exploring nation after all, and we can do that. NASA's budget, actually all of NASA’s budget only accounts for, I think, less than 2 percent of our entire federal budget."
Where NASA fits into the federal budget
To find out if Edwards' claim about NASA's budget was accurate, we first turned to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan government agency responsible for producing "independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues" for Congress. A CBO report from October 7 estimates that total federal spending in 2015 amounted to almost $3.7 trillion.
Of that $3.7 trillion, how much was allocated to NASA?
About $18 billion, according to NASA's 2015 Operating Plan found on its website. When you do the math, that's about 0.48 percent, well under the 2 percent that Edwards noted on C-SPAN. That share of the budget is comparable to other federal departments and agencies such as the Department of Transportation (0.46 percent) and the Department of Agriculture (0.62 percent).
NASA's budget for fiscal year 2016 is projected to fall along similar lines. Of President Barack Obama's (D) $4 trillion proposed spending plan, $18.5 billion—or 0.46 percent—has been requested for NASA.
It has actually been almost four decades since NASA's budget topped 2 percent. According to a database of historical budgets maintained by the Office of Management and Budget, the last time NASA's budget exceeded 2 percent of the federal budget as a whole was 1969, the first year of Richard Nixon's (R) presidency and the year that the Apollo 11 mission placed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Of $183 billion, NASA received $4.2 billion, totaling about 2.3 percent. Since then, NASA's portion of federal spending has steadily declined, with the exception of a brief uptick in the early 1990s under the administration of President George H.W. Bush (R).
The highest percentage of the federal budget that NASA has ever taken up was under President Lyndon Johnson (D) in 1966. In that year, NASA's budget amounted to 4.4 percent at almost $6 billion out of $134 billion.
Conclusion
We looked at budget documents from the Congressional Budget Office and NASA and found Edwards' statement to be true. In the most recent federal budget, NASA's spending accounted for less than half-a-percent of total federal spending. According to the Office of Management and Budget, NASA's budget has hovered at less than 2 percent of the total federal budget since 1969.
Launched in October 2015 and active through October 2018, Fact Check by Ballotpedia examined claims made by elected officials, political appointees, and political candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We evaluated claims made by politicians of all backgrounds and affiliations, subjecting them to the same objective and neutral examination process. As of 2025, Ballotpedia staff periodically review these articles to revaluate and reaffirm our conclusions. Please email us with questions, comments, or concerns about these articles. To learn more about fact-checking, click here.
Sources
C-SPAN, "Representative Donna Edwards on Federal Highway Funding Deadline," October 15, 2015
Congressional Budget Office, "Overview," accessed October 26, 2015
Congressional Budget Office, "Monthly Budget Review for September 2015," October 7, 2015
Office of Management and Budget, "2016 Summary Tables," June 1, 2014
Office of Management and Budget, "Historical Tables: Budget of the U.S. Government," June 1, 2014
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