Who's On First
NASA and the Trump White House Can't Decide Who's in Charge
The NASA website on January 21, 2025 said these people were running the agency. The White House says they’re not. Image source: NASA.gov.
Tradition has it that a NASA administrator and deputy submit their resignations at the end of a president’s term. Those are political appointments, subject to approval by the Senate. It’s up to the next president to accept or reject the resignation.
The resignation typically is accepted if the president is a different person, especially a person from a different political party.
Tradition also has it that the career civil service — those who are not political appointees — administer the agency until the new nominees are approved by the Senate. The senior NASA civil servant is the acting administrator.
That was supposed to be Jim Free, an associate administrator who oversaw the agency’s ten centers. Free was the federal equivalent of a chief operating officer for NASA.
When administrator Bill Nelson’s resignation became effective at twelve noon on January 20, 2025, Free became acting administrator. The agency’s “NASA Leadership” webpage was updated to show Free in charge.
Not so fast.
Late in that afternoon, the Trump White House posted a press release naming acting executives for a number of agencies. Near the bottom, the NASA acting administrator was … Kennedy Space Center director Janet Petro.
Space journalists reached out to the White House for clarification and were told that, yes, Petro is the acting administrator.
As of this posting, the NASA Leadership webpage still shows Free in charge.
Trump’s rhetoric often claims the existence of a “deep state” within the federal government secretly conspiring against him and the American people. Among the many executive orders he issued on Day One was an order attempting to strip many career civil servants of their privileges under existing federal law. The order requires civil servants to carry out the president’s orders without question. “Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.”
There’s no evidence that Free is a rabid partisan, other than his NASA career prospered under Democratic president Barack Obama. That president in November 2012 appointed Free to run the NASA Glenn center, where he was viewed as a reformist during a time that the agency was struggling to change its culture from OldSpace to NewSpace.
Free left NASA in May 2017, shortly after Trump was first sworn in as president in January 2017. Free returned to NASA in September 2021 during the Biden administration to serve as the agency’s associate administrator for exploration systems development.
It may be that Trump, who favors unquestioning loyalty above all else, wanted to purge NASA of anyone who might be anything less than blindly obedient to his agenda.
So why Janet Petro?
There’s no reason to think she’s any more or less partisan than Free. Perhaps the difference is that she remained during the Trump administration and was familiar to Trump appointees during that term. According to her NASA biography:
From 2017 through January 2020, she served as the Program Executive leading the agency-wide initiative for a phased implementation to restructure all mission enabling functions to ensure efficient and effective support of NASA’s missions. Her assignment to the Mission Support Future Architecture Program (MAP) concluded in January 2020.
Another reason may be an idea floated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on January 8 at a KSC media event. DeSantis, whose relationship with Trump often runs hot-and-cold, proposed that NASA Headquarters be moved from Washington, DC to KSC. He claimed that outgoing administrator Nelson showed “interest” in the idea.
For those of you unfamiliar with Nelson’s life story, he was raised in the Space Coast, represented Kennedy Space Center’s district in the US House from 1979 to 1991, and was one of Florida’s two US senators from 2001 to 2019. The Space Coast is in his blood.
The idea of moving NASA Headquarters is fraught with implausibilities — one being that Congress would have to approve it, and another being that nine other centers are going to ask why they can’t host headquarters.
It also assumes that NASA’s raison d'être is launching rockets into space. In actuality, NASA does a lot of things, such as aviation research and development, earth observation satellites, robotic exploration of the solar system, and much more. Moving headquarters to KSC ignores all those other responsibilities, as well as the convenience of NASA executives mingling with the elected representatives in Congress who authorize and appropriate NASA’s annual budgets.
But the reality is that SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, two of the richest people on the planet, have Trump’s ear. Both were in attendance right behind Trump when he took the presidential oath in the Capitol rotunda yesterday. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the present and future at KSC and adjacent Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
So it makes sense that they might want Petro and not Free running the show until Trump’s nominee, billionaire Jared Isaacman, is approved by the Senate.
Free, meanwhile, was in Finland to sign an agreement adding that country to the list of Artemis Accord signatories. The NASA press release described Free as “NASA Associate Administrator.” During the Biden administration, Administrator Nelson typically attended those events in person, so the implication is that Free was representing NASA as its chief executive.
As of 5 PM Eastern time, the NASA website still lists Free as acting administrator. The old guard isn’t going down without a fight.
UPDATE January 22, 2025 7:20 PM EST — The NASA website now shows Janet Petro as acting administrator, with Jim Free as associate administrator.
Lori Garver, NASA deputy administrator during President Obama’s first term, commented on X:
In 2009 @NASA similarly operated on the assumption that the AA would be acting Administrator without consulting the transition team. We were considering others, but chose not to make it an issue. It was a mistake that delayed progress on our priorities. This decision makes sense.
Garver had headed the Obama transition team. She wrote in her memoir Escaping Gravity that the team encountered resistance from the Bush administration’s leadership in the week’s leading up to the Obama inaugural. She knows of what she speaks.
Petro sent out an email to agency employees today stating that she was rooting out all diversity programs within NASA, in compliance with Trump’s exeutive order. Petro wrote:
"These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination."