I heard that the Trump Administration cut several parts of NASA completely of Federal grants which includes education. These cuts are in affect in 2018 so my question is, does that include grants and sponsorship NASA gives to FIRST and FIRST teams? I hope not but please let me know if it does, many teams rely on NASA’s Robotic Alliance grant and general sponsorship.
My understanding from conversations that were had around the time that the budget cuts were originally announced, was that these cuts will not directly affect the NASA FRC grants, as they come from a different part of NASA’s budget. That being said, the proposed budget and tax plan do represent significant attacks on education, government funded research, and domestic reinvestment overall, so there will be many knock on effects for the programs that support FIRST and the job opportunities for our students after they graduate.
This may not be a complete picture, but I have two data points:
The NASA Robotics Alliance recipients for 2018 are listed here.
3946 has received NASA funding for the 2018 season through the “house teams” program. The full list is here.
Note that as the US Government fiscal year runs Oct-Sep, these are both from the FY18 budget.
If you’d like an official response, or have any concern about this build season, I’d suggest having your head mentor reach out to [email protected]
If you’d like an unofficial response - it’d look bad for the government to take money away from school programs after having made that promise. Things could always change in the future (just like any sponsor!) but I would suspect it’d be unlikely that we would see much change during this build season.
The government has broken many promises already this year so I wouldn’t be surprised if they broke another. My team is not directly affected by this cut because we do not get funding from them except last year we got the robotics alliance grant. I more posted this so if anyone who may be effected may see this and are then will know more then just what the news says and because I will be mentoring next year and the following year, this may effect me in the future. Its good that none of y’all think a large change this year will likely occur
I read somewhere that the “cuts” were line-item cuts to specific programs and that the overall NASA budget actually increased slightly.
A lot of it probably depends on what you consider a “cut”, most of the time when people refer to “cuts” all they’re really talking about is a reduction in the amount the budget automatically increases every year (which is typically around 3% depending on the department). It’s pretty rare for government programs to get actual cuts where the budget is lower than the previous year.