"The losses to global astronomy caused by Donald Trump's budget cuts are beyond comprehension."

In the summer of 2019, thousands of people camped for weeks at the foot of the famous Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea to prevent the construction of a giant new telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), there. In late May , the Trump administration announced it was definitively abandoning funding for the controversial project.

For the past fifteen years of their movement, opponents of the TMT have rightly pointed out the lack of respect astronomers have shown in the past for the natural resources and cultural importance of this mountain to Native Hawaiians. They also point out that scientists benefit from Hawaii's colonial status, which guarantees them free use of some of the most valuable land in the former kingdom, which was annexed by the United States in 1898.

Have Trump and his allies suddenly converted to ecology and decolonial justice? Obviously not. The cancellation of public funding for the TMT is part of the new regime's broader, unprecedented attack on all sciences, with particular aggression reserved for astrophysics. Trumpism does not accept that the truth can be stated anywhere other than on the social network Truth Social .

With the presentation at the end of May of the 2026 budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA , the sky has darkened for US astronomy. Beyond the TMT, the Gemini telescopes will have to operate at 50%; the still very active historic sites of Kitt Peak (Arizona) and Cerro Tololo (Chile) will be sold off piecemeal (to whom?); one of the two LIGO gravitational wave detectors will be put into hibernation shortly after its construction, despite the promise of so-called "multimessenger" astronomy, crowned by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017. As for NASA 's research missions, it's a massacre, whether they concern Mars, Venus or Jupiter, including for many probes already launched.

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