After a rudderless yr and an exodus of around 4,000 employees due to Trump administration cuts, NASA obtained what could also be its first piece of fine information lately. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the company’s new administrator. He now holds the energy to rehabilitate a battered engine of scientific analysis, or steer it in direction of much more disruption.
Contemplating the caliber of President Trump’s different appointees, Isaacman is most likely the greatest candidate for the job. Exterior of being a profitable entrepreneur, he has flown fighter jets and been to house twice as a part of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn non-public missions. A type of flights noticed him complete the first commercial space walk, and journey farther from Earth than any human since the finish of the Apollo program.
“Good is the enemy of the good. Isaacman checks quite a lot of containers,” says Keith Cowing, a former NASA worker and the founding father of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. “He is handed each requirement to fly in a spacecraft that American astronauts at NASA are required to move. He additionally went out of his approach to have a various crew, and shove as a lot science as he might in these missions.”
And but in the event you’re a NASA worker or simply somebody who cares about the company’s work, there are nonetheless loads of causes to be involved for its future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman in the spring, the billionaire wrote a 62-page doc detailing his imaginative and prescient for NASA. In November, Politico obtained a copy of that plan, titled Venture Athena.
To some insiders, Venture Athena painted an image of somebody who, a minimum of at the time when it was written, essentially misunderstood how NASA works and the way scientific discovery is funded in the US and elsewhere. It additionally suggests Isaacman could also be extra open to Trump’s NASA agenda than would seem at first look.
When requested about the plan by Politico, one former NASA official characterised it as “weird and careless.” One other referred to as it “presumptuous,” given lots of the proposed modifications to the company’s construction would require Congressional approval. In a single part, Isaacman advisable taking “NASA out of the taxpayer funded local weather science enterprise and [leaving] it for academia to decide.” In one other part, he promised to consider the “relevance and ongoing necessity” of each company heart, significantly NASA’s iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying the facility and others should improve the “output and time to science KPI.”
Rather a lot has modified since Isaacman first wrote that doc. It got here before the workforce cuts, before the future of Goddard Space Flight Center grew to become unsure and before Trump stunned everybody by renominating Isaacman. However during his Senate testimony earlier this month, the billionaire stated “I do stand behind every thing in the doc, though it was written seven months in the past. I believe it was all directionally right.”
He did seem to distance himself from some viewpoints expressed in or inferred by Venture Athena, nevertheless. Isaacman said that “something suggesting that I’m anti-science or need to outsource that duty is merely unfaithful.” He additionally got here out in opposition to the administration’s plan to reduce NASA’s science funds almost in half, claiming the proposals would not lead to “an optimal outcome.”
One factor is clear, Isaacman is not your typical bureaucrat. “One among the pitfalls of some prior NASA directors has been that they’ve proven an excessive amount of reverence for the inside processes and bureaucratic construction of the company to the detriment of decision-making and efficiency,” said Casey Drier, chief of house coverage at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and examine of house. “Isaacman has positioned himself as the reverse of that. Clearly, that is one thing that might lead to quite a lot of political and congressional challenges if taken too far.”
Even when Isaacman does not comply with by on any of the proposals made in Venture Athena, there’s solely a lot a NASA administrator — even one sympathetic to civil servants working beneath them — can do.
“As soon as a funds request goes out publicly, everybody in the administration has to defend it. Something he does can have to be inside and personal,” Drier explains. “He by no means explicitly criticized the administration throughout his listening to. He is additionally coming comparatively late in the funds course of.”
Numerous NASA’s future will rely on the White Home Workplace of Administration and Price range (OMB), which is chargeable for implementing the president’s agenda throughout the govt department. As a direct results of guidance the OMB issued over the summer season, NASA awarded 25 percent fewer new grants in 2025 than it did on common between 2020 and 2024.
“The OMB has added layers of necessities that scientists now have to undergo to spend the cash they’ve already been allotted. The administration has labored in opposition to its personal said objectives of effectivity,” Drier stated. “Isaacman cannot resolve that himself. He cannot inform the OMB what to do. That is going to be a critical problem.”
Looming over every thing is the truth NASA nonetheless does not have a full-year funds for 2026. Congress has till January 30 to fund NASA and the remainder of the federal authorities before the short-term funding invoice it handed on November 12 runs out. “On paper, the official coverage of the administration is nonetheless to terminate a 3rd of NASA’s scientific functionality,” Drier factors out.
There are causes to be cautiously optimistic. Publicly, each the Home and Senate have come out in opposition to Trump’s funding cuts. And a few science missions that had been slated to be cancelled, reminiscent of OSIRIS-APEX, have been permitted for an additional full yr of operations.
What NASA wants now is somebody who will, as Drier places it, “vigorously advocate” for the company in no matter approach they’ll. It stays to be seen if that is Jared Isaacman.
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