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But a leaked draft of the president⁘s 2026 budget request, which Scientific American has reviewed, instead calls for canceling Roman.

⁘This is nuts. You⁘ve built it, and you⁘re not going to do the final step to finish it?⁘ says astrophysicist David Spergel , president of the Simons Foundation and former co-chair of Roman⁘s science team. ⁘That is such a waste of taxpayers⁘ money.⁘

Roman isn⁘t the only casualty in the president⁘s draft NASA budget, which is still in flux and will ultimately require congressional approval. The proposal cuts heavily into the $25-billion space agency⁘s science division, home to missions that include JWST , the twin Voyager probes , the Hubble Space Telescope and a fleet of Mars rovers that have colored in our understanding of the cosmos and captured imaginations worldwide for half a century.

Privately, space policy experts have been even less charitable about the proposal: ⁘It sets back a program that is clearly the leading program in the world⁘in a historic fashion,⁘ says a former government official, speaking to Scientific American on condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation. ⁘You take that program and shoot it through the head.⁘

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