NASA finally has a leader, but its future is no more certain

After a rudderless year and the displacement of about 4,000 employees due to Trump administration cuts, NASA got what may be its first good news recently. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the agency’s new director. He now has the ability to rehabilitate the dilapidated scientific research engine, or direct it towards further disruption.

Given the caliber of President Trump’s other appointees, Isaacman is perhaps the best candidate for the job. Aside from being a successful businessman, he has flown fighter jets and gone into space twice as part of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn special missions. On one of those flights, he completed the first commercial spaceflight, traveling farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo program.

“Perfect is the enemy of good,” says Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. “Isaacman checks a lot of boxes.” “He passed every requirement to fly a spacecraft that American astronauts at NASA are required to pass. He also did his best to have a diverse crew and put as much science into those missions as possible.”

However, 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 detailing his vision for NASA. In november, POLITICO I obtained a copy of that plan entitled Project Athena.

Some insiders say Project Athena paints a picture of someone who, at least at the time it was written, misunderstood how NASA works and how scientific discovery is funded in the United States and elsewhere. It also suggests that Isaacman may be more open to Trump’s NASA agenda than might first appear.

When asked about the plan before POLITICOOne former NASA official described it as “weird and sloppy.” Another called it “hypothetical,” given that many of the proposed changes to the agency’s structure would require congressional approval. In one section, Isaacman recommended getting NASA out of taxpayer-funded climate science work [leaving] It is up to academia to determine. In another section, he promised to evaluate the “continuing importance and necessity” of each of the agency’s centers, especially NASA’s iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying the facility and others must increase “production and time to science KPI.”

Much has changed since Isaacman first wrote that document. This came before the workforce was cut, before Goddard Space Flight Center’s future became 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 the document, even though it was written seven months ago. I believe it was all directly true.”

However, he seems to distance himself from some of the views expressed or inferred through the Athena Project. Isaacman stated that “Anything that suggests I am anti-science or willing to outsource this responsibility is simply not true.” He also opposed the administration’s plan to cut NASA’s science budget nearly in half, claiming the proposals would not produce an “optimal outcome.”

One thing is clear: Isaacman is not a typical bureaucrat. “One shortcoming of some past NASA administrators is that they showed too much deference to the internal processes and bureaucratic structure of the agency at the expense of decision-making and performance,” said Casey Dreyer, head 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, this is something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges if it goes too far.”

Even if Isaacman does not pursue any of the proposals presented in Project Athena, there is only so much a NASA administrator — even one sympathetic to the civil servants who work under him — can do.

“Once a budget request is made public, everyone in the administration has to defend it,” Dreyer explains. “Anything they do has to be internal and private.” “He did not explicitly criticize the administration during the hearing. He also came relatively late in the budget process,” he added.

Much 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 issued by the Office of Management and Budget over the summer, NASA awarded 25% fewer new grants in 2025 than it awarded on average between 2020 and 2024.

“The Office of Management and Budget has added layers of requirements that scientists now have to go through to spend the money they were already allocated,” Dreyer said. “The administration has worked against its stated efficiency goals.” “Isaacman can’t solve the problem himself. He can’t tell OMB what to do. That would be a serious challenge.”

Hanging over everything is the fact that NASA still doesn’t 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 administration’s official policy remains to terminate one-third of NASA’s science capacity,” Dreyer points out.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. Publicly, both the House and Senate opposed Trump’s funding cuts. Some science missions that were scheduled to be cancelled, such as OSIRIS-APEX, have been approved for another full year of operations.

What NASA needs now is someone who, Dreyer says, will “aggressively advocate” for the agency in any way possible. It remains to be seen if this is Jared Isaacman.