One would likely assume that one of the initial prerequisites for running a major, highly visible federal agency would be believing in the work that agency does, to the point that you have a bunch of ideas about how a huge budget could be spent. Imagine you work at that agency: Would you expect your new administrator to come in and argue that the organization could get even more great work done with more funding? Or would you expect your new administrator to argue in favor of slashing and burning his own budget, eliminating jobs and programs within his agency? Unfortunately, when you’re NASA, and the administrator in question is a billionaire Trump stooge who is only there because he’s a patron of Elon Musk, what you get is the latter. It doesn’t matter that humans returned to the moon just a month ago for the first time in 54 years: this was clearly the perfect time to gut the agency that just got the monumental feat done.
This week, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who took on the post in early 2026 after a contentious year in which his nomination was at one point withdrawn by Trump before being reissued, made the rounds in front of Congress. Speaking before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology yesterday, Isaacman prostrated himself before President Donald Trump, claiming that the catastrophic slashing of the NASA budget requested by the President in his annual budget request to Congress–including a nearly 50% cut to NASA’s science budget–was in fact a really great thing. Of course, you probably didn’t read many headlines about that, given that a throwaway piece of clickbait about Isaacman saying that he wants Pluto to be classified as a planet again instead generated far more media attention.
1) There’s no reason an administrator at NASA should care how a Solar System body is categorized.
2) NASA isn’t the org that makes classification determinations for Solar System objects.
3) If Isaacman wants Pluto reclassified again, he can lobby the International Astronomical Union on his own time.
— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) Apr 28, 2026 at 5:08 PM
It was the perfect piece of Trump-era deflection from the portion of the story that actually matters; Isaacman swearing up and down that he’s fully in favor of stripping billions of dollars in federal funding from his agency. The NASA administrator recently said that despite Trump’s budget request proposing a loss of $6 billion from NASA, nearly a quarter of its total budget, that funding would be “sufficient” to “meet high expectations and deliver on all mission priorities.”
What’s actually on the potential chopping block for NASA? The most devastated in terms of dollar figures would be NASA’s science and research funding, which would drop from $7.25 billion in 2025 to less than $3.9 billion. Space technology funding would go from $920.5 million to $624.3 million, while funding for space operations, including the International Space Station, would go from $4.2 billion to around $3 billion, while providing no funding for the ISS replacement that is supposedly meant to be functional by 2030, when the current space station is meant to be retired. The one area seeing increased funding would be “exploration,” because Trump apparently can see the marketing value of the recent Artemis mission, while being oblivious to the need for science and technology research to continue supporting future exploratory missions. Other programs would be eliminated entirely, such as funding for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, which funds educational programs and grants designed to foster applicants to NASA-relevant STEM careers. In fact, Christina Koch, one of the Artemis II astronauts who became the first woman to travel out of Earth’s orbit, was one of the STEM grant recipients from this very program–the same grant that Koch received would now be eliminated.
“Ending these grants at a time when this nation just witnessed the wonders of space will thwart the education and dreams of the next generation of scientists,” said Democratic Rep. Deborah Ross (NC).
On cutting STEM Engagement, admin says:
“NASA will inspire the next generation of explorers through exciting, ambitious space missions, not through subsidizing woke STEM programming and research that prioritizes some groups of students over others and has had minimal impact on the student outcomes.”
— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) Apr 22, 2026 at 10:04 PM
If this sounds like a familiar debate, by the way, that’s because it is. When Donald Trump made his budget request to Congress for the 2026 budget, it included nearly identical, massive cuts to NASA’s funding. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle rejected those cuts and kept NASA’s funding relatively steady instead, and Republican Rep. Brian Babin (TX) recently told NASA Administrator Isaacman to his face that he expected the same to happen for 2027, noting that Congress rejected the President’s plan for wanton cuts in 2026, and that he is “confident that they are going to be rejected again. I simply do not believe that this budget proposal is capable of supporting what President Trump himself has directed the agency to accomplish over the course of his two terms, nor what Congress has directed by law.”
You don’t have to look far, in fact, to find Republican members of Congress alarmed by plans to say, terminate more than 40 “low priority” NASA missions, while still planning major undertakings like the rest of the Artemis program, which still claims it will return human beings to the surface of the moon in 2028. Republican Rep. Don Bacon (NE) and Democratic Rep. Judy Chu (CA), the co-chairs of the Congressional Planetary Science Caucus, released a joint statement saying their members were “deeply alarmed” by the proposed NASA budget and its administrator’s willingness to slash his own agency, saying the following: “These drastic cuts would create enormous chaos and uncertainty for critical missions, the scientific workforce, and long-term research planning. At the same time, current funding for NASA Science has not kept pace with inflation, underscoring the need for more investment, not less.”
So, who is this man tasked both with shepherding NASA into its most publicly visible period since the 1960s, and gutting its budget?
Jared Isaacman, Donald Trump and Elon Musk
Jared Isaacman is, first of all, a self-made billionaire who started a payment processing company called United Bank Card from its parents’ basement in 1999 when he was just 16 years old. He dropped out of high school to grow his credit card payment processing company, now called Shift4 Payments, which went public in 2020. Along the way, Isaacman, an avionics nerd, also founded a defense firm called Draken International, which supplies fleets of retired military fighter jets and aircraft for training exercises. He sold a large stake in that company to Blackstone in 2019, further boosting his net worth. No doubt this is one of the things that made Donald Trump feel comfortable in Isaacman’s presence, given that he loves the idea of billionaires installed in every corner of the federal government.
That said, there’s little doubt that Isaacman is genuinely passionate about some aspects of space, particularly manned missions and tech-bro-style “adventure.” He has spent massive amounts of his own money as a private citizen to finance (and then command) his own ego-stroking space missions, with the assistance of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2021, his Inspiration4 mission sent four civilian astronauts (including himself) into low Earth orbit for three days, while his 2024 Polaris Dawn mission included himself and one of his crewmates performing the first ever spacewalk conducted by private citizens. The cost of these missions was enormous, with the cash funneled toward the use of Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon spacecraft–it has been estimated that Isaacman spent more than $400 million in his own cash for the services of Musk’s SpaceX. Which is all to say, Isaacman has been one of Elon Musk’s very best private customers in recent years, with spending comparable to a small nation.
Jared Isaacman is an climate-denier Musk-fanboy space billionaire who is overseeing the rapid demolition and privatization of NASA’s earth science mission.
He tells @voosen.me that he wants to fire NASA’s scientists and leave NASA as a money funnel for privately owned earth-monitoring satellites.
— Brad Johnson (@climatebrad.hillheat.com) Mar 11, 2026 at 12:22 PM
It has therefore been speculated that Musk was a major booster for Isaacman’s appointment as the NASA administrator, given Isaacman’s demonstrated willingness to find ways to give money to SpaceX. The subsequent hot-and-cold treatment by Donald Trump certainly suggests this is the case. At right about the time last summer when Elon Musk, angry about the contents of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” began calling Donald Trump a pedophile online and pointing out his thousands of appearances in the Epstein Files, Trump suddenly soured on Isaacman, withdrawing his nomination for the NASA job. As soon as Musk returned to licking Trump’s boots in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, though, Isaacman suddenly found himself back in the good graces of the POTUS as well, and the nomination was re-submitted.
Still on the internet, though: Donald Trump explicitly smearing Jared Isaacman last July on Truth Social, saying that it would be inappropriate for Isaacman to run NASA because of his close business ties to Musk.
“Elon asked that one of his close friends run NASA,” wrote Trump at the time, while still feuding with Musk. “While I thought his friend was very good, I was surprised to learn that he was a blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before. Elon probably was, also. I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life. My Number One charge is to protect the American Public!”
I’m sure you’ll agree that it is odd and deeply unexpected that as soon as Musk began complimenting Donald Trump once again, the problem of Isaacman’s prior political donations and business ties to Musk suddenly became no longer inappropriate. You have to love that Donald Trump doesn’t care enough to even bother deleting these kinds of old posts that so clearly illustrate his hypocrisy. Thanks for making it easy, DJT.
As administrator, then, Isaacman seems to see his job as rubber-stamping whatever agenda Trump–a man whose understanding of space science and travel is likely on a grade school level–desires to see the agency engage in, while putting up absolutely no fight about the agency being gutted from the inside out. Rather, that seems to be Isaacman’s desire as well, to transfer as many of NASA’s responsibilities as possible to enriching a handful of oligarchs in the private sector. He’s even reportedly in favor of phasing out NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which the agency has spent more than $31 billion developing over the course of decades, and which just put human beings into space for the very first time via the Artemis II mission. Instead, he wants to–surprise–give a whole lot more business to Musk’s SpaceX.
The toady-ish desire to please and advance Trump’s agenda, whatever the hell that might be, has not gone unnoticed. As Casey Dreir the chief of space policy for the non-governmental nonprofit Planetary Society recently put it: “The administrator is part of the administration, and the budget document is an official policy statement of the administration, so he has to be onboard. But it’s discordant. The budget itself is seemingly contradictory with a number of statements that Nasa leadership said a few weeks ago at the Ignition event. It adds more confusion to this situation than clarity and is a baffling piece of political ideology from an alternate universe in which they didn’t suffer an overwhelming defeat of that proposal just months ago.”
Dreir refers to the very real possibility that Congress simply rejects Trump’s requested slashing of the NASA budget, exactly as they did in 2026, granting Isaacman what he apparently would prefer to fight like hell rather than receive: More funding.
This week, the President welcomed the members of the Artemis II mission, NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, to the Oval Office for an official backslapping session, which as in other recent press conferences immediately derailed into unrelated discussions about topics like the Iran War, the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, and Trump claiming that former FBI director James Comey was trying to have him killed. Through all of the completely unrelated rambling from the POTUS, the nervous astronauts stood perched behind Donald Trump, knowing full well that the same man recently submitted a budget request that would cut almost 50% of NASA’s science funding from 2027’s budget–research that is working, for instance, to determine how to keep space radiation from killing every astronaut attempting the Mars mission NASA also insists is in its long-term plans. While they circled the moon, traveling further from the planet than any human ever had before, Trump had made sure to choose that moment to steal the majority of global news attention by announcing that “A whole civilization will die tonight,” in reference to the still-ongoing Iran War.
Not to be outdone, and displaying his trademark sixth sense for knowing exactly when the right time would be to make things as painfully awkward for his subordinates as he possibly can, Trump took this moment in the Oval Office to … publicly mock Jared Isaacman for having large, prominent ears. As the camera pushed in on a flushing, embarrassed Isaacman, you can almost hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music begin to play in the distance. Such is the life of an administrator under Trump 2.0. Let’s hope NASA can survive the experience.
Trump to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman: “You heard that question? With those beautiful ears of yours.”
(Check out how awkward Isaacman looks after Trump says this to him.)
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) Apr 29, 2026 at 5:46 PM