You Don't Say

The headlines reported Jared Isaacman's failure to directly answer a question about Elon Musk, but the real question is if he'll have any real authority.

Jared Isaacman testifies to the Senate Commerce Committee on April 9, 2025. Video source: Space SPAN.

Much of the media coverage of NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman’s confirmation hearing fixated on his evading a question about SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) grilled Isaacman about Musk’s possible presence in the room last December at Mar-a-Lago, when President-Elect Donald Trump offered him the position. Isaacman acknowledged that Musk was on the property but wouldn’t say if Musk was in the room during the interview.

“Senator, I'm trying to be as transparent as I can. I was being interviewed by the President of the United States,” Isaacman said.

“I'm assuming that you don't want to answer the question directly because Elon Musk was in the room,” Markey replied. “I think that's the only conclusion anyone listening to this could reach.”

Personally, I couldn’t care less.

I assume that Musk was the one who recommended Isaacman in the first place. As I wrote in a December 6, 2024 Substack article, Isaacman is Musk’s customer. He purchased his two private space missions, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, from SpaceX. His company, a payment processing company called Shift4, purchased $27.5 million of SpaceX shares in February 2021, according to CNN. The article cited an email Isaacman sent to Shift4 employees indicating he intends to retain his equity interest in Shift4, “subject to ethics obligations.”

His financial ties to SpaceX do raise a red flag, especially since Trump has issued executive orders directing the Department of Justice to end prosecutions of certain white-collar crimes. For those concerned that Isaacman might just give SpaceX no-bid contracts to run NASA, federal procurement laws have lots of land mines to protect that. When NASA awards contracts, it’s not unusual for losing bidders to file appeals and even lawsuits. These legal actions can delay a contract for months, if not years. So I’m not concerned unless Isaacman starts behaving in a way contrary to his career’s track record.

Of more concern to me is that Isaacman’s testimony didn’t match up with what the Trump White House is doing to the NASA budget.

The good news is that, when Trump tried to whack NASA’s budget during his first administration, he failed. Congress decides NASA’s budget and programs, not the president.

The first proposed NASA budget during the first Trump administration was for Fiscal Year 2018. Trump proposed cutting NASA’s budget from FY17 by $600 million, from $19.7 billion to $19.1 billion. Five NASA earth science missions would have been terminated. NASA’s Office of Education would have been shut down. It would have terminated the Carbon Monitoring System and reduced funding for Earth science research grants.

As now, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Trump didn’t get his way. NASA’s final budget for FY18 spent $20.7 billion.

In his FY19 budget proposal, Trump tried to terminate the International Space Station in 2025. He tried yet again to terminate education and earth science programs. He failed.

In the final two years of his first term, the Democrats controlled the House while the Republicans controlled the Senate. Despite Trump’s proposals, NASA’s budget increased each year. The actual expenditures by fiscal year during his first term:

FY18 $20.7 billion
FY19 $21.5 billion
FY20 $22.6 billion
FY21 $23.3 billion

As now, when the first fiscal year’s budget proposal was released, NASA had no administrator. A career official, Robert Lightfoot, prepared the budget at the direction of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

It wasn’t until later that year, on September 1, 2017, that Trump finally nominated a NASA administrator. Jim Bridenstine was a Republican House representative from Oklahoma. Both of Florida’s senators — Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio — objected to a career politician being nominated for NASA administrator.

But when he left office at the end of Trump’s first term, Bridenstine was generally considered to have been one of NASA’s better administrators. Under Bridenstine, NASA’s budget requests went up each year. He also consolidated disparate human deep spaceflight programs under the name Project Artemis. Bridenstine continued the policy established by the Obama administration to rely on private companies and entrepreneurs for launch services, other than the Space Launch System forced by Congress onto the agency in 2010. That program is known by critics as the Senate Launch System, for having been crafted by senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).

Unlike Bridenstine, whose nomination didn’t come until September of the first Trump term’s first year, Isaacman was nominated before Trump took office, in December 2024. Widely admired within the aerospace industry, support for Isaacman has been largely bipartisan. Twenty-eight astronauts, including former KSC director Bob Cabana and Arizona Democratic senator Mark Kelly’s twin brother Scott, signed a letter endorsing him. Most of the criticism seems to come from those who oppose him having anything to do with Trump or Musk, or those who reflexively dislike rich people.

Isaacman is well known as a philanthropist, raising $250 million for St. Jude and donating hundreds of millions of his own money. He donated an undisclosed sum to the United States Space Force Historical Foundation at Cape Canaveral to fund a new museum. His campaign contributions over the years have been to both Democrats and Republicans. Media reports suggest that Isaacman’s nomination hearing was delayed due to his contributions to Democrats, and his companies’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Ars Technica reported on March 25 that committee chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) was displeased with Isaacman’s support of Democrats.

Isaacman’s strength is also his weakness. Unlike Bridenstine and his successor Bill Nelson, he’s not a politician. It remains to be seen if he can play the political game in Washington, not just on Capitol Hill but also in dealing with the Trump White House and its OMB.

President Obama nominated US Marine Corps General Charlie Bolden, a retired astronaut, in May 2009 to be NASA administrator. Like Isaacman, Bolden was also well-liked and respected, and not a career politician. But his first year was, to be diplomatic, tumultuous. The low point was when he told Al-Jazeera that he’d been directed by Obama to prioritize outreach to the Muslim world. The White House said that wasn’t true. But Bolden grew in the role, and served through the end of Obama’s second term.

The day after Isaacman’s testimony, Ars Technica published an article claiming the publication had a copy of NASA’s FY26 budget proposal. The proposal contradicted much of what Isaacman promised the hearing committee. According to the article, the proposal would cut NASA’s budget by 20% from FY25, and science programs by almost half. The document apparently was sent by Trump’s OMB to NASA executives.

The article states that Isaacman probably wasn’t involved in the budget proposal process. “Nominees, typically, are excluded from policy prior to confirmation.”

If that’s the case, then the Trump White House just made Isaacman look like a fool.

In his opening remarks, Isaacman described himself as “an advocate for science.” He noted the experiments performed on his two SpaceX crew Dragon commercial flights, and his offer to personally fund a mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. He said, “We will launch more telescopes, more probes, more rovers, and endeavor to better understand our planet and the universe beyond.”

But according to the Washington Post, Trump’s budget proposal would cancel all new NASA telescope projects. The already assembled Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is currently undergoing testing and is targeting May 2027 for launch. According to the Post:

NASA’s astrophysics budget would take a huge hit, dropping from about $1.5 billion to $487 million. Planetary science would see a drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. Earth science would drop from about $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion.

The Planetary Society issued a press statement noting the contradiction between Isaacman’s testimony and the Trump budget proposal.

Days ago, the Administration’s nominee to lead NASA called for a “new golden age of science and discovery” at the agency. The proposed budget from within the White House — which cuts NASA science by 47% — would plunge NASA into a dark age instead.

Isaacman had assured the committee members that simultaneous crewed missions were possible to both the moon and Mars. He spoke of creating a robust commercial space industry in low Earth orbit. He envisioned more science programs.

But he didn’t call for an increase in NASA’s budget.

So how does he intend to pay for all this?

Isaacman said he intended to make NASA “a financially self-sustaining agency.” That would be a nice trick, considering government agencies by definition are designed to be service-oriented, not profit-oriented.

It’s been tried before. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tried to defer Space Shuttle mission costs by delivering commercial payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA offered subsidies so commercial satellite companies would fly with the agency, and not a commercial launch company, either in the US or overseas.

It didn’t work.

By putting the government in competition with the private sector, US commercial launch companies all but went extinct. The Carter administration had issued a directive that military payloads should also fly on Shuttle, further reducing the number of potential customers for commercial launchers.

Shuttle commercialization came to an end after the Challenger accident in January 1986. By that time, both the military and the private sector were unhappy with the Shuttle’s launch delays. In the 1970s, NASA had promised the Shuttle would launch once a week. In 1985, only nine Shuttle missions launched.

Challenger was an excuse for the Pentagon to divorce itself from Shuttle. The Reagan administration allowed the military to once again acquire launches on uncrewed expendable commercial rockets. Reagan eventually issued a policy directive that commercial payloads should only launch on the expendable boosters, to help grow that industry and also reduce the pressure on NASA to launch, which was one of the contributing causes to the accident.

One way NASA might pull it off this time is through the use of Space Act Agreements, or SAAs. The original National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 granted the agency the authority “to enter into and perform such contracts, leases, cooperative agreements, or other transactions as may be necessary in the conduct of its work and on such terms as it may deem appropriate …”

SAAs were used throughout NASA’s history, but the Obama administration used SAAs to enter into a number of agreements that created competition in the commercial space industry. Use of SAAs neatly avoided the pressure to direct pork to the states and districts of members of Congress who represented NASA legacy contractors, or had NASA jobs in their districts. Congress was so incensed that it ordered the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate NASA’s use of SAAs. (NASA was exonerated.)

Fifteen years later, NASA routinely enters into SAAs. NASA updates their SAA lists on their website every quarter. SAAs can be funded or unfunded, the latter meaning no money changes hands. But NASA can also pay for a service, such as delivering a crew on a commercial spacecraft to the International Space Station, or NASA can be compensated for its services, such as use of astronaut training facilities in Houston.

NASA is also sitting on a repository of knowledge, research that goes back to its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which began in 1915. At the discretion of the administrator, NASA can make that knowledge available for free, or the agency can license it. An example is Bigelow Aerospace’s licensing of NASA TransHab technology; the agency even loaned some of its engineers to Bigelow to help the startup initiative.

All this flies in the face of how federal budgeting works. Congress passes two budget bills — one for authorization, one for appropriation. Authorization is how much you’re allowed to spend, and on what you can spend it. Appropriation is the amount of money we’re going to give you. NASA might be authorized to spend $25 billion but, if Congress only appropriates $20 billion, something has to go.

I doubt that Isaacman’s NASA can generate anywhere close to the amount of money to make NASA self-sustaining. Even if it did, there’s nothing to stop Congress from redirecting that revenue elsewhere, e.g. to pay for tax cuts. NASA doesn’t get to choose what it does. That’s up to Congress.

Jared Isaacman walks into this valley of fire as a political innocent. Will he be another Charlie Bolden? Or another Jim Bridenstine? Or will he find a new path?

If the president he serves undercuts him, which is not uncommon with this president, I have to wonder if Isaacman chooses to walk, as have so many who have served in a Trump administration before.