NASA finally has a leader, but its future is no more certain
After a rudderless year and an exodus of around 4,000 employees due to Trump administration cuts, NASA got what may be its first piece of good news recently. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the agency's new administrator. He now holds the power to rehabilitate a battered engine of scientific research, or steer it towards even more disruption.
Considering the caliber of President Trump's other appointees, Isaacman is probably the best candidate for the job. Outside of being a successful entrepreneur, he has flown fighter jets and been to space twice as part of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions. One of those flights saw him complete the first commercial space walk, and travel farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo program.
"Perfect is the enemy of the good. Isaacman checks a lot of boxes," says Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and the founder of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. "He's passed every requirement to fly in a spacecraft that American astronauts at NASA are required to pass. He also went out of his way to have a diverse crew, and shove as much science as he could in those missions."
And yet if you're a NASA employee or just someone who cares about the agency's work, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned for its future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman in the spring, the billionaire wrote a 62-page document detailing his vision for NASA. In November, Politico obtained a copy of that plan, titled Project Athena.
To some insiders, Project Athena painted a picture of someone who, at least at the time when it was written, fundamentally misunderstood how NASA works and how scientific discovery is funded in the US and elsewhere. It also suggests Isaacman may be more open to Trump's NASA agenda than would appear at first glance.
When asked about the plan by Politico, one former NASA official characterized it as "bizarre and careless." Another called it “presumptuous," given many of the proposed changes to the agency's structure would require Congressional approval. In one section, Isaacman recommended taking “NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and [leaving] it for academia to determine.” In another section, he promised to evaluate the “relevance and ongoing necessity” of every agency center, particularly NASA's iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying the facility and others must increase the “output and time to science KPI.”
A lot has changed since Isaacman first wrote that document. It came before the workforce cuts, before the future of Goddard Space Flight Center became uncertain and before Trump surprised everyone by renominating Isaacman. But during his Senate testimony earlier this month, the billionaire said “I do stand behind everything in the document, even though it was written seven months ago. I think it was all directionally correct.”
He did appear to distance himself from some viewpoints expressed in or inferred by Project Athena, however. Isaacman stated that “anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue.” He also came out against the administration's plan to cut NASA's science budget nearly in half, claiming the proposals would not lead to "an optimal outcome."
One thing is clear, Isaacman is not your typical bureaucrat. "One of the pitfalls of some prior NASA administrators has been that they've shown too much reverence for the internal processes and bureaucratic structure of the agency to the detriment of decision-making and performance," said Casey Drier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space. "Isaacman has positioned himself as the opposite of that. Clearly, that's something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges if taken too far."
Even if Isaacman doesn't follow through on any of the proposals made in Project Athena, there's only so much a NASA administrator — even one sympathetic to civil servants working under them — can do.
"Once a budget request goes out publicly, everyone in the administration has to defend it. Anything he does will have to be internal and private," Drier explains. "He never explicitly criticized the administration during his hearing. He's also coming relatively late in the budget process."
A lot of NASA's future will depend on the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for implementing the president's agenda across the executive branch. As a direct result of guidance the OMB issued over the summer, NASA awarded 25 percent fewer new grants in 2025 than it did on average between 2020 and 2024.
"The OMB has added layers of requirements that scientists now have to go through to spend the money they've already been allocated. The administration has worked against its own stated goals of efficiency," Drier said. "Isaacman can't solve that himself. He can't tell the OMB what to do. That's going to be a serious challenge."
Looming over everything is the fact NASA still does not have a full-year budget for 2026. Congress has until January 30 to fund NASA and the rest of the federal government before the short-term funding bill it passed on November 12 runs out. "On paper, the official policy of the administration is still to terminate a third of NASA's scientific capability," Drier points out.
There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Publicly, both the House and Senate have come out against Trump's funding cuts. And some science missions that were slated to be cancelled, such as OSIRIS-APEX, have been approved for another full year of operations.
What NASA needs now is someone who will, as Drier puts it, "vigorously advocate" for the agency in whatever way they can. It remains to be seen if that's Jared Isaacman.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-finally-has-a-leader-but-its-future-is-no-more-certain-201109072.html?src=rss