2026 midterms could reshape Congress's control over NASA's budget and Moon plans

By the Everything Space news desk · 21 Oct 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: The Planetary Society

High turnover in Congress and unresolved NASA funding and authorization questions mean the November elections will help decide the agency's direction for years to come.

As the current Congress nears its end, NASA is left with several major unresolved issues: a new authorization bill, a full-year budget for fiscal year 2027, and a disputed overhaul of science grant rules. None of these has been settled into law, leaving the agency's priorities, including a proposed lunar base and other initiatives announced under Administrator Jared Isaacman, without firm congressional backing.

The upcoming midterm elections could bring sweeping change to Congress, with dozens of retirements and competitive races pointing to a historically high number of new members. This turnover will be felt most in the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which already tends to have lower seniority than other panels, while the Senate Commerce Committee and Appropriations Committees are expected to see comparatively less change, aside from a few high-profile contests.

Because congressional sessions reset every two years, any space legislation not finalized by January will have to start over in the next Congress. This puts the NASA authorization bills, which passed committee in both chambers but have not reached a floor vote, at risk of stalling further amid competition from other priorities like defense policy and government funding deadlines.

NASA is currently operating under a continuing resolution that holds its budget at the prior year's level, well above the administration's proposed cuts, while also pausing controversial changes to federal grant rules. If no funding deal is reached by the resolution's expiration, a government shutdown could trigger those grant changes and further strain the agency's operations.

The piece notes that NASA's science programs, particularly research and analysis grants, have already suffered from years of flat funding eroded by inflation and from this year's spending delays, compounding the effects of past workforce reductions. These pressures, combined with the Moon base and other new initiatives announced this year lacking formal funding lines, leave major space policy decisions for the incoming Congress to resolve.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.