After a year without wheels and the displacement of about 4,000 employees due to the Trump administration’s cutbacks, NASA received what may be its first good news recently. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the agency’s new director. Now you have the power to revive the broken engine of scientific research, or steer it into further disarray.
Given the caliber of President Trump’s other nominees, Isaacman is probably the best for the job. Besides being a successful businessman, he has flown in military aircraft and gone to space twice as part of the private missions Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn. One of those flights saw him complete the first commercial space flight, and travel further from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo program.
“Absolute is the enemy of good. Isaacman checks a lot of boxes,” said Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. “He passed all the spaceflight requirements that American astronauts at NASA have to go through. He also went out of his way to have a diverse crew, and he crammed as much science as possible into those missions.”
But 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 about its future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman in the spring, the billionaire wrote a 62-page document outlining his vision for NASA. In November, Politics received a copy of that plan, titled Project Athena.
For some insiders, Project Athena painted a picture of a person, at least at the time of writing, who does not fully understand how NASA works and how scientific discoveries are funded in the US and elsewhere. It also suggests that Isaacman may be more open to Trump’s NASA agenda than first appeared.
Asked about the program by Politicsone former NASA official described it as “reckless and reckless.” One called it “presumptuous,” given that many of the proposed changes to the agency’s structure would require Congressional approval. In another section, Isaacman recommended getting “NASA out of the taxpayer-funded climate science business and [leaving] for scholars to decide.” In another section, he promised to examine the “relevance and continued need” of all the agency’s facilities, especially NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying that this facility and others must increase “the output and timing of scientific KPI.”
A lot has changed since Isaacman first wrote that document. It came before staff cuts, before the future of the Goddard Space Flight Center was uncertain and before Trump surprised everyone by renominating Isaacman. But during his Senate testimony earlier this month, the billionaire said “I stand behind everything in this document, even though it was written seven months ago. I think everything was accurate.”
He appeared to distance himself from some of the ideas expressed or implied by Project Athena, however. Isaacman said “anything that suggests I’m anti-science or want to abdicate that responsibility is not true.” He also came out against the administration’s plan to cut NASA’s science budget nearly in half, saying the proposals would not lead to “a positive outcome.”
One thing is clear, Isaacman is not your average boss. “One of the pitfalls of some former NASA administrations is that they showed too much respect for internal processes and agency structure that undermined decision-making and operations,” said Casey Drier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates for space exploration and study. “Isaacman has positioned himself as the opposite of that. Obviously, that’s something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges if done too much.”
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 the government employees working under him — can do.
“Once the budget request is out in the open, everyone in charge has to defend it. Anything they do has to be internal and secret,” explained Drier. “He did not criticize the administration during his hearing. He comes very late in the budget process.”
Much of NASA’s future will depend on the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for carrying out the president’s executive agenda. As a direct result of guidance issued by OMB this summer, NASA awarded 25 percent fewer new grants in 2025 than it did on average between 2020 and 2024.
“OMB has added layers of requirements that scientists now have to go through in order to use the money they’ve already been allocated. The administration has worked against their stated goals of efficiency,” said Drier. “Isaacman can’t solve that himself. He can’t tell OMB what to do. That’s going to be a big challenge.”
To top it all off, NASA still doesn’t have a budget for the full year of 2026. Congress has until January 30 to fund NASA and the rest of the federal government before the temporary funding bill passed on November 12 expires.
There are reasons for cautious optimism. Publicly, the House and Senate have come out against Trump’s budget cuts. And other science missions that had to be canceled, such as OSIRIS-APEX, have been approved for another full year of operation.
What NASA needs now is someone who will, as Drier says, “not forcefully represent” the agency in any way. Whether that is Jared Isaacman remains to be seen.
