NASA’s uncertain future with new chief

According to RCO News Agency, After a year of idle time and the departure of about 4,000 employees due to layoffs by the Trump administration, NASA recently finally received its first good news. It was on December 17 that the US Senate confirmed “Jared Isaacman” as the new director of this organization, and he now has the power to rebuild the worn-out engine of scientific research or lead it to further disruption.

Given the caliber of Donald Trump’s other appointees, Isaacman is probably the best candidate for the job, according to Engget. In addition to being a successful billionaire entrepreneur, he has flown fighter jets into space twice as part of the private missions Inspiration 4 and Polaris Dawn. In one of these flights, he also performed the first commercial spacewalk and since the end of the “Apollo” program, he has traveled further from the earth than any other human being.

Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of the NASA Watch blog, which is dedicated to this agency, says: Perfection is the enemy of being good. Isaacman has many criteria. He has met all the requirements for spaceflight that American astronauts at NASA are required to meet. He also made every effort to have a diverse crew and applied as much science as possible to these missions.

However, if you’re a NASA employee or someone who cares about the agency’s activities, there’s still plenty of reason to worry about NASA’s future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman to lead NASA 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 inside NASA, “Project Athena” painted a picture of someone who, at least at the time it was written, fundamentally misunderstood how NASA worked and how it funded scientific exploration in the United States and elsewhere. It also suggested that Isaacman might be more receptive to Trump’s directives about NASA than first appears.

When Politico asked a former NASA official about the plan, he described it as “weird and careless.” Another former NASA official called it “impudent” given that many of the proposed changes to the agency’s structure require congressional approval.

In one part of the plan, Isaacman recommended getting NASA out of the taxpayer-funded climate science business and leaving it up to universities to decide. Elsewhere, he promised to evaluate the relevance and necessity of continuing any agency center, especially NASA’s iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying that this center and others should increase output and time for science.

A lot has changed since Isaacman first wrote that plot. The document was released before the workforce cuts, before the future of the Goddard Space Flight Center became uncertain and before Trump surprised everyone by renominating Isaacman, but the billionaire said during Senate testimony earlier this month: “I support everything in this document, even though it was written seven months ago.” I think everything was right in terms of orientation.

However, he seemed to distance himself from some of the views expressed in, or inferred from, Project Athena. Isaacman stated: “Anything that suggests that I am anti-science or that I want to outsource this responsibility is absolutely false.” He also opposed the administration’s plan to cut NASA’s science budget by nearly half, claiming that the proposals would not lead to “the desired outcome.”

One thing is clear, Isaacman is no ordinary bureaucrat. Casey Drier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that supports space exploration and study, says that one of the problems with some of NASA’s previous administrators has been that they have been too respectful of the agency’s internal processes and bureaucratic structure, which has hurt decision-making and performance. Isaacman has put himself in the opposite position. Obviously, if it goes too far, this is something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges.

Even if Isaacman doesn’t pursue any of the suggestions made in Project Athena, a NASA administrator, even one who sympathizes with the civil servants who work under them, can only do so much.

“When a budget request is made public, everyone in the government has to defend it,” Dreyer explains. Everything he does must be internal and private. He never openly criticized the government during his hearing. He also enters the budget approval process relatively late.

Much of NASA’s future rests 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 office released this summer, it awarded NASA 25 percent less new funding in 2025 than the average between 2020 and 2024.

The White House Office of Management and Budget has added layers of requirements that scientists must now go through in order to spend the money already allocated to them, Dreyer says. The government has acted contrary to its stated goals for productivity. Isaacman cannot solve this problem by himself. He cannot tell this office what to do. This will be a serious challenge.

Overshadowing everything is the fact that NASA still does not have a full annual budget for 2026. Congress has until Jan. 30, 2026, to fund NASA and the rest of the federal government before the short-term budget bill it passed Nov. 12 expires. On paper, the administration’s official policy is still to terminate one-third of NASA’s science capability, Dreyer notes.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. Publicly, both the House and Senate have opposed Trump’s budget cuts, and some science missions like OSIRIS-APEX, which were supposed to be canceled, have been approved for another full year.

What NASA needs now is someone who, as Dreyer says, will strongly support the organization in any way he can, and it’s not yet clear whether that person is Jared Isaacman.

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