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Preliminary copies of some of the US government’s spending plans suggest that President Donald Trump’s administration intends to slash climate and space science across some US agencies.

At risk is research that would develop next-generation climate models, track the planet’s changing oceans and explore the Solar System. NASA’s science budget for the fiscal year 2026 would be cut nearly in half, to US$3.9 billion. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors Earth’s climate and makes weather forecasts, would have its 2026 budget cut by 27%, to $4.5 billion. The leaked documents containing this information were sent by the White House to federal agencies last week; they were reported by other media outlets and obtained by Nature.

Although the proposed cuts aren’t final, they have alarmed scientists and science advocates alike. “We’re talking about a wholesale dismantling of NASA’s scientific fleet and the pipeline of future missions,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a non-profit space organization in Pasadena, California. “Trump’s budget plan for NOAA is both outrageous and dangerous,” says a statement released by Zoe Lofgren, a member of the US House of Representatives from California, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “This budget will leave NOAA hollowed out.”

“No final funding decisions have been made,” says Alexandra McCandless, a spokesperson for the US Office of Management and Budget. The proposed cuts come as Trump’s team has tried to downsize the US government markedly, firing federal workers en masse and axing programmes, purportedly in the name of government efficiency.

Here, Nature looks at some of the programmes and projects that, according to the documents, are on the chopping block.

Crucial climate science

NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which funds numerous scientific endeavours, including climate modelling, cloud monitoring and hurricane forecasting, would be slashed by 74%, to $171 million. OAR is the agency’s main research arm, with 11 laboratories and 16 cooperative institutes that collaborate with scientists at various universities; the budget proposal would defund any of them that work on climate, weather or the ocean. The draft budget also appears to terminate funding for “Regional Climate Data and Information”, a $50 million programme to help communities with climate science, such as tracking droughts and heat waves. In total, the cuts would eliminate OAR as an independent office and disperse its remaining activities to other parts of NOAA. For many scientists, it’s a sign that the Trump administration is planning to turn its back on research that is needed to help understand long-term climate and environmental effects. “This is a huge threat to research at NOAA, but also to the safety and economic security of the American public,” says Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator for research at NOAA.

A next-generation space telescope

The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, iconic for their views of the cosmos, won’t last forever. And now, their successor could be in trouble. The $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is nearing completion at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, but Trump’s preliminary proposal would cancel all funding for it, as well as for many other Goddard projects. During his first term as president in 2017–21, Trump, a Republican, tried repeatedly to eliminate funding for the Roman telescope, but was blocked by the US Congress in each case. The same could happen this time: “I will fight tooth and nail against these cuts,” said Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, whose district includes the Goddard centre and who is the ranking member of the congressional spending committee that oversees NASA.

Earth-observing satellites

Trump’s proposals would cancel next-generation Earth-observing satellites at both NASA and NOAA. At NASA, the Earth-science budget would be cut in half, to just over $1 billion; that would almost certainly derail efforts to launch a fleet of new satellites to monitor factors crucial to weather and climate forecasting, including aerosols, clouds and sea-level rise. At NOAA, preliminary plans call for the cancellation of a programme to build and launch new weather satellites in geostationary orbits, which is a backbone of US weather-forecasting efforts. Trump would also remove climate instruments on future weather satellites, and end the long-standing agreement through which NASA launches NOAA’s weather satellites.

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Mother is sharing tablet PC with boy at home.  Parents/Morsa Images via getty

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Today mathematician Alan Turing is world-famous because he helped the Allies achieve victory against the Axis powers by deciphering an encryption that was considered unbreakable. That story inspired the 2014 film The Imitation Game. Turing’s cryptographic work remained under wraps until the 1970s, however, so his incredible achievements only became known after his death.During his lifetime, Turing was known among certain experts. He developed the mathematical model of a computer and explained which mathematical

quantities it could calculate—and which tasks would exceed even the most sophisticated algorithms. He is also well known for a test that he developed, later named after him, that assesses how “human” artificial intelligence appears to be. For instance, if people cannot tell whether they are chatting to a real person or an AI, then the machine has passed the Turing test.

The list of Turing’s scientific contributions is long. But one area of his research is rarely mentioned: his work on mathematical biology that dealt with the formation of patterns. He was interested in the question of how animals develop their impressive stripes and spots, and he was convinced that there must be a mechanism by which pigments in skin cells arrange themselves into these patterns.

How Does the Tiger Get Its Stripes?

When I first heard about this, I was puzzled. One of my physics professors mentioned a link between abstract mathematical operators and a tiger’s stripes in a first-semester lecture, a connection that made me and my fellow students laugh rather than think. After all, what could the pattern of a tiger’s skin have to do with abstract mathematics? Until then, I had assumed that some complex biochemical processes led to the tiger’s impressive patterns of dots and stripes—not something that could be represented by a tensor (a kind of high-dimensional table).

I now realize that I lacked Turing’s imagination. According to his mother, even as a child, he was a dreamer who marveled at the natural world around him. He wanted to understand his surroundings. Mathematics lent itself as a language to reduce even the most complex relationships to the essentials. And so Turing found a very simple mechanism that could explain nature’s patterns.

To understand Turing’s ideas, you first need a little biological background. A tiger’s coat pattern is already determined before it is born. In the embryo, pigment-producing cells emerge at the point where the spinal column will later develop. From there, they migrate through the entire body. Although research into these cells was lacking in Turing’s time, he recognized that there was a developmental process that formed skin patterns, and he wanted to find out how this occurred.

It was impossible to model all the interacting molecules of an animal embryo. Moreover, Turing was not an expert in biochemistry. Therefore, as is usual for mathematicians, he started with a very simple model. He investigated how two different pigment-producing molecules, which he generally called morphogens, spread from cell to cell.

A Story of Two Morphogens

Let’s assume that one morphogen is responsible for the color black and another for orange. The more black or orange morphogens there are, the more of these molecules are generally produced. In addition, these two substances influence each other: the orange morphogens can inhibit the production of the black ones.

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I have a photographic memory of the Christmas morning when a 10-year-old me was given the gift she’d been begging for — a Chinese box turtle we named Ping — carried down to the living room in his then-squeaky-clean glass enclosure like a little prince on parade. Despite Ping later being set free by the well-meaning people who had graciously inherited him (and likely killed within five minutes of freedom), Ping had a good life. He ate his lettuce pieces and chicken bits, swam in his plastic pool, occasionally scuttled across our kitchen floor. But, looking back, it’s not like my life was necessarily greatly enhanced by Ping — or by Dandelion the rabbit, or the pair of newts who lived in our bathroom, or Mei Li, the cat who hated people. Which is probably why, as an adult, I have never thought of pets as more than a nuisance.

Given my early cat trauma, I have often cited some combination of landlord restrictions and vague allergies whenever my kids brought up pets. But when we moved out of our two-bedroom apartment into a larger house last fall, I began to run out of excuses. I also began to wonder if I was missing out on something. We had been a little family, not stable by any means but at least consistent, for years now. Couldn’t we stand growing a bit? Around Christmas, I indulged myself in looking at the available cats at the local animal shelter. I imagined something simpler than my kids but more rewarding than my Peloton. In January, we brought home a 6-month-old tuxedo cat we named Midnight. (Sorry, shelter volunteers, but “Jerry” is not a cat name.) I am almost embarrassed to tell you how much I love this cat.

And when I asked my son, who gets easily anxious and dysregulated easily, why he was seeming so chill lately, he answered immediately: “Midnight.” Far from ruining our lives, our kitty does provide the company you are speculating a dog might — he snuggles with the kids when they are upset, provides me with the maternal adoration my children are slowly losing, and regularly serves as a peace offering when we hurt each other. I don’t know that the leopard gecko we tried to talk our kids down to would have achieved all this. With all due respect to goldfish, my experience tells me that they mostly just swim in circles.

But every family is different, and our experience is just our own, I surveyed a few dozen parents, with and without pets, to see what was going on in their households. Plenty of parents are ambivalent about family pets or fully against getting them. Angela, a mom of two, put it like this: “the last thing I need is another dependent!” Other parents who have said no to pets cited being at the limits of caretaking already (“Aren’t kids enough unpaid labor??”), as well as space issues, the expense and logistics of caring for them when traveling, and for one mom, the smell. (After 30 years, I can still perform olfactory teleportation and conjure the rankness of Ping’s cage.) One mother, Kate, admitted that she regrets adopting a cat for her kids: Like Mei Li, the cat’s love language is attacking humans, and Kate’s kids are now begging for a dog instead.

More of the parents I spoke to, however, believed that their animals, and what their animals meant to their children, were well worth it.

When Margaret and Brent, parents to 5-year-old Tycho, first started dating, a central component of their courtship was texting each other pictures of pit bull puppies. But after they had their son, Margaret felt overwhelmed by the idea of taking on another responsibility. “What if we end up with a dog who has medical complications or serious behavioral issues?” she wondered. When she pushed through her worries and adopted Phoebe, a sweet brown pit bull mix, they gained an essential family member. Tycho, who is autistic, took to Phoebe instantly, running alongside her at the beach and adding her name as one of his first spoken words. Phoebe is not only like a sibling to Tycho, whose older half-brothers are out of the house, but she helps him through transitions, something that can often cause him great distress. “If he gets to hold the leash,” Margaret admits, “he’ll kind of go anywhere.”

Several of the parents I surveyed used the terms “sibling” or “best friend” to describe their kids’ relationship with their pets (usually dogs or cats), in all the good and challenging ways, the latter often leading to growth, especially for only children. As one parent of a 19-month-old put it: “Sometimes she wants to smother [the dog] in love, other times she is frustrated by his presence. But he is teaching her to tolerate the existence of another being in our family that requires attention, care, and love.” Another parent referred to their dog as “screen-free entertainment.”

As far as having another dependent, for us, a cat feels like a good balance. Do the kids actually help? Studies are inconclusive, but my anecdotal experience is don’t count on it. While I was surprised to hear from my mom that I was actually a dutiful cleaner of Ping’s cage and attender of his vet appointments, my kids have been a real disappointment in terms of practical help with Midnight. Despite having had a democratic chore-picking session when we first got him, they have pretty much done zero daily feeding or cleaning. But they do care for him on their own unhelpful but sweet timelines, brushing him when they’re in the mood or clearing out his litter box when it feels like a game.

But other kids, it seems, are better than mine! Kim, father to Oscar, 7, and dog-father to Zazzie, claims that Oscar completes dog-related chores each morning. Darina’s 8-year-old actually walks one of their dogs! And Joy’s 9-year-old daughter not only feeds the dogs twice a day (“90% of the time, and only complains/drags her feet some of the time”) but also feeds and cleans the cage of her bearded dragon.

Of course, we couldn’t have had Midnight in our old apartment (there’s the space thing), and he’s already set us back a few hundred bucks. (Margaret told me, unapologetically, that she’s spent at least $10,000 on Phoebe’s medical bills.) But we were gifted a feeder by my sister, we bought some very cheap secondhand toys, and we are hoping keeping him inside will help.

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