WASHINGTON — The House Appropriations Committee has approved $875 million to fund public transportation for the 2028 Olympic Games, a positive sign for LA28 after the exclusion of Olympics transit funding from President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget request this spring.
The funding must be passed by Congress in a future spending bill — part of a lengthy 2027 budgeting process that is underway now — but its approval in committee last week is a crucial signal of investment from Washington after weeks of uncertainty.
“We are encouraged by the House Appropriations Committee’s action,” spokesperson Maya Pogoda of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said in a statement, “and we look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the White House to make America’s Games the best ever in history.”
LA Metro has sought $2 billion in federal funding for the planned transit service for the Games, which includes leasing buses, hiring drivers and building temporary depots. With the clock ticking to start projects that require significant lead time to be completed before the Games, the absence of any funding in Trump’s budget request in April had raised concerns among lawmakers and other stakeholders.
In recent weeks, the transit authority, the city and LA28 had publicly pressed for federal funding; LA28 Chief Executive Casey Wasserman reportedly met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in April.
“The House Appropriations Committee’s most recent transportation bill is another positive signal of the continued bipartisan support in Congress to provide federal transit money for the Games,” LA28 spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez told The Times.
The inclusion of the funding in the bill conveyed bipartisan support for the Games, an event that Trump — who places an outsize importance ondisplays of patriotism — is likely to want to see go well during his tenure.
“This is on the American stage,” said former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who was on the City Council during the 1984 Olympic Games. “The success of the Games are the success of the country.”
The Olympics item was included in the fiscal year 2027 transportation funding bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee last week. In its report, the committee noted that the funding is intended for all host cities, including those outside California.
“The 2028 games will put our nation on center stage, and this investment will help ensure that we are prepared to meet the moment and showcase why the United States is the best country in the world,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who chairs the subcommittee that put forth the bill, said in a statement.
The Games in Los Angeles are expected to draw massive crowds and will be the first Summer Olympics held in the United States since Atlanta hosted in 1996. More than 4 million tickets were sold during LA28’s first ticket release; asecond ticket drop is coming in August.
The massive event requires federal involvement not just on funding but also on issues including athlete visas and the import of Olympic horses.
LA Metro has planned to lease 1,700 buses from transit agencies across the country, build three temporary transit depots and create dedicated traffic lanes for athletes, officials and others as required by the International Olympic Committee. Metro estimates that 1 million additional trips per day will be taken during the 16-day Games.
It’s crucial for federal funding to come through in a timely manner, Yaroslavsky said, particularly given the scope of the security and transportation considerations for the sprawling Games.
“The city and the LA28 committee need to know that this money is going to be made available,” Yaroslavsky said. “This has to be in place long before the Games start.”
WASHINGTON — NASA recaptured the world’s attention with Artemis II, which took astronauts to the moon and back for the first time in half a century. But the agency’s scientific projects could again be under threat as the Trump administration makes a renewed push to drastically cut their funding — including at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The cuts, proposed in the Trump administration’s 2027 budget request to Congress, would pose further challenges to the already weakened Caltech-managed lab and could be broadly damaging to American efforts to bring back new discoveries from space. They echo last year’s attempt by the administration to slash NASA funding, which Congress rejected.
Though the Artemis project is billed as laying a foundation for a crewed NASA mission to Mars, exploration of the Red Planet is among the endeavors that could be slashed. The rover currently exploring Mars’ ancient river delta and a mission to orbit Venus are among projects with JPL involvement targeted for spending cuts, according to an analysis of the NASA budget proposal by the nonprofit Planetary Society.
“This isn’t [because] they’re not producing good science anymore. There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which led opposition to the administration’s similar effort to cut NASA funding last year.
Storm clouds hang over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 7, 2024.
(David McNew / Getty Images)
This time, the administration is asking Congress to cut NASA funding by 23% — including a 46% cut to its science programs, which are responsible for developing spacecraft, sending them into outer space to observe and analyzing the data they send back.
The proposal would cancel 53 science missions and reduce funding for others, according to the Planetary Society analysis. The effort to pare down NASA Science comes amid the Trump administration’s broader effort to cut scientific research across federal agencies.
The plan swiftly drew bipartisan criticism from members of Congress, who rejected the administration’s similar 2026 proposal in January. Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, indicated last week that he would work to fund NASA similarly for 2027, saying it would be “a mistake” not to fund science missions.
Moran plans to hold a hearing with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman before the end of April to review the budget request, a spokesperson for his office said. The president’s budget request is an ask to Congress, which ultimately holds the power to allocate funding.
But until Congress creates its own budget, NASA will use the plan as its road map, which could slow grants and contracts. The proposal “still creates enormous chaos and uncertainty in the meantime for critical missions, the scientific workforce, and long-term research planning,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), whose district includes JPL.
A NASA spokesperson declined to comment Friday. In the budget request, Isaacman wrote that NASA was “pursuing a focused and right-sized portfolio” for its space science missions in order to align with Trump’s federal cost-cutting goals.
The budget “reinforces U.S. leadership in space science through groundbreaking missions, completed research, and next-generation observatories,” Isaacman wrote.
Jared Isaacman testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the NASA administrator in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3, 2025.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
At JPL — which has for decades led innovation in space science and technology from its La Cañada Flintridge campus — questions had already swirled about the lab’s role in the future of NASA work.
Multiple rounds of layoffs over the last two years, the defunding of its embattled Mars Sample Return mission and a shift by the Trump administration toward lunar exploration and away from the type of scientific work that JPL executes had pushed the lab into a challenging stretch.
It has had a steady stream of employee departures in recent months, and those left have been scrambling to court outside funding from private investors, sell JPL technology to companies and increase productivity in hopes of keeping the lab afloat, according to two former staffers, who requested anonymity to describe the mood inside the lab.
“If we’re not doing science, then what are we doing?” asked one former employee, who recently left JPL after more than a decade there.
A spokesperson for the lab declined to comment, referring The Times to the budget proposal.
The NASA programs marked for cancellation or cutbacks support thousands of jobs at JPL and other centers, said Chu, who has led a push for increased funding for NASA Science. After last year’s layoffs, JPL “cannot afford to lose more of this expertise,” she said in a statement.
Among the JPL projects that appear to be slated for cancellation are two involving Venus, Dreier said. One, Veritas, is early in development and would give work to the lab for the next several years, he said.
The project would be the first U.S. mission to Venus in more than 30 years, Dreier said, and aims to make a high-resolution mapping of the planet’s surface and observe its atmosphere.
The Perseverance rover, which is on Mars collecting rock and soil samples, could face spending reductions. The budget request proposes pulling some funding from Perseverance to fund other planetary science missions and reducing “the pace of operations” for the rover.
Though how the Mars samples might get back to Earth is uncertain, the rover is still being used to explore the planet and search for evidence of whether it could have ever been habitable to life.
Researchers hope the tubes of Martian rock, soil and sediment can eventually be brought back to Earth for study. The team has about a half a dozen more sample tubes to fill and the rover is in good shape, said Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and Arizona State University professor who leads the camera team on Perseverance, which works daily with JPL.
He said NASA’s spending proposal put forth “no plan” for the future of the agency’s work.
“Are people just supposed to walk away from their consoles,” Bell asked, “and let these orbiters around other planets or rovers on other worlds — just let them die?”
The NASA document did not clearly show which programs were targeted for cuts and did not list which projects were targeted for cancellation. The Planetary Society and the American Astronomical Society each analyzed the proposal and found that dozens of projects appeared to be canceled without being named in the document.
Across NASA, other projects slated for cancellation according to the Planetary Society’s analysis include New Horizons, a spacecraft exploring the outer edge of the solar system; the Atmosphere Observing System, a planned project to collect weather, air quality and climate data; and Juno, a spacecraft studying Jupiter.
The administration’s plan also doesn’t prioritize new scientific projects, Bell said, which further jeopardizes long-term job stability and space discovery at centers like JPL.
“We’re going through this long stretch now with very few opportunities to build these spacecrafts,” Bell said. “All of the NASA centers are suffering from the lack of opportunities.”
Last year, the Trump administration proposed to slash NASA’s 2026 funding by nearly half. Instead, Congress approved funding in January that provided $24.4 billion for the agency — a cut of about 29% rather than the proposed 46%. The 2027 budget request asks for $18.8 billion.
Congress kept funding for science missions nearly steady, allocating $7.25 billion for science missions, about a 1% decrease from 2025. The administration had proposed cutting the science investment down to $3.91 billion. This time, the budget requests $3.89 billion.
Under the Trump administration, NASA has put an emphasis on moon exploration, including this month’s successful Artemis II mission. Isaacman, who defended the proposed cuts on CNN last week, touted the agency’s lunar plans, including a project to build a base on the moon.
The agency has indicated commitment to some existing science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the to-be-launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Dragonfly spacecraft set to launch for Saturn’s moon in 2028, and other projects.
“NASA doesn’t have a topline problem, we just need to focus on executing and delivering world-changing outcomes,” Isaacman said on CNN.
Scientists have urged the government not to choose between funding science and exploration but to keep up investment in both.
“It’s ultimately kind of confusing, especially on the heels of the Artemis II mission,” said Roohi Dalal, deputy director for public policy at the American Astronomical Society. “The scientific community … is providing critical services to ensure that the astronauts are able to carry out their mission safely, and yet at the same time, they’re facing this significant cut.”
