President Donald Trump has named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as the interim administrator of NASA, following his decision to withdraw the nomination of tech billionaire Jared Isaacman.
Duffy’s appointment comes as the agency faces the prospect of significant budget cuts that could reshape NASA’s priorities in the months ahead.
Why It Matters
NASA’s leadership change comes at a pivotal moment for the agency, which is already bracing for potentially severe funding cuts that could delay missions, scale back research, and limit partnerships with the private space sector.
It comes on the heels of a proposed White House budget for 2026 that would slash the agency’s funding by 25 percent and eliminate more than 5,000 staff — cuts that, if enacted, would reduce the agency’s budget and workforce to their smallest levels since the early 1960s.
Meanwhile, the appointment of Duffy — who has no direct experience in space policy — raises questions about the future direction of America’s space program just as competition with China and other nations intensifies. The move also highlights growing tensions between Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX plays a critical role in U.S. space launches.
What To Know
Trump announced Duffy’s appointment in a social media post on Wednesday.
“Sean is doing a TREMENDOUS job in handling our Country’s Transportation Affairs, including creating a state-of-the-art Air Traffic Control systems, while at the same time rebuilding our roads and bridges, making them efficient, and beautiful, again. He will be a fantastic leader of the ever more important Space Agency, even if only for a short period of time. Congratulations, and thank you, Sean,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Shortly after the president’s post, Duffy wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Honored to accept this mission. Time to take over space. Let’s launch.”
Trump pulled the nomination of Isaacman – a private astronaut with close ties to Musk – on May 31, just days before the Senate had been set to vote on his nomination, and shortly after Musk’s department from the government was announced.
Isaacman had made previous donations to Democrats; Trump said his decision came after a “thorough review of prior associations” as well as growing concern over “corporate entanglements.” The president added that he would replace Isaacman with someone who was “[m]ission aligned.”
The president defended his decision again over the weekend, saying it would have been “inappropriate” for someone so closely connected to Musk — and the private space industry — to oversee an agency that is central to Musk’s business empire.
Musk, once a key Trump ally and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, left the administration amid a falling-out with the president over parts of Trump’s agenda. Tensions between Duffy and Musk reportedly flared during a March cabinet meeting over alleged efforts to fire air traffic controllers as part of Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting strategy.
Duffy will now take charge of the $25 billion NASA budget at a moment when the agency is bracing for deep cuts — a belt-tightening push that echoes some of the controversial cost-cutting measures Musk championed before his departure.
More Than 2,000 Jobs Cut
At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to depart as part of a sweeping push to shrink the agency’s workforce — a move that could seriously disrupt White House space policy and drain NASA of decades of institutional expertise, experts suggest. According to documents obtained by Politico, the employees leaving include those in GS-13 to GS-15 positions — senior civil service grades typically reserved for staff with specialized skills or key management roles.
The departures are heavily concentrated at the top, with 875 GS-15 employees expected to exit. In total, the 2,145 senior staff make up the bulk of the 2,694 civil servants who have agreed to leave NASA through early retirements, buyouts, or deferred resignation offers — part of a wider administration effort to pare down the federal workforce.
Many of these departing employees are directly involved in NASA’s core mission areas like science, human spaceflight, and deep space exploration. Of the total, 1,818 work on mission-related projects, while the rest handle critical support roles such as IT, facilities, or financial management.
The cuts have sparked backlash online. Senator Mark Kelly warned that forcing out more than 2,000 senior NASA staff could cripple America’s ability to compete with China in space, comparing it to what might have happened if NASA had lost key leaders before the original moon landing.
“What would’ve happened if 2,000+ senior NASA leaders were pushed out before the moon landing? We would’ve lost the space race to the Soviets. And now we risk losing the next space race to China,” he wrote on X.
Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society echoed that concern, saying the cuts stripped the agency of critical management and technical expertise and questioning what goal the administration hoped to achieve.
“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency. What’s the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?” Dreier told Politico.
The losses are spread across all ten of NASA’s regional centers, with Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center being the hardest hit as it is set to cut 607 employees. Johnson Space Center in Texas will lose 366 staff, Kennedy Space Center in Florida will lose 311 and NASA headquarters in Washington will lose 307. Other key hubs, including Langley, Marshall, and Glenn Research Center, will also see steep reductions.
While some cuts align with the administration’s goals — such as significant staff reductions at Goddard, a hub for climate and earth science missions the White House aims to scale back — analysts suggest other losses could undercut major priority areas, including plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2027 and eventually to Mars.
So far, only about half the total workforce reductions the White House wants have been achieved, raising the possibility of forced layoffs if more employees don’t opt in to the voluntary departure program before it closes on July 25.
Ultimately, the proposed cuts to NASA’s staff and budget still need congressional approval — and lawmakers could push back. In March, the Senate Commerce Committee signaled its intent to protect the agency’s workforce in its own budget blueprint, setting the stage for a potential clash over the future of America’s space program.
NASA told Politico it remains committed to its core missions and is working with the White House to keep America at the forefront of space exploration, including plans for the Moon and Mars, despite the more constrained budget.
“NASA remains committed to our mission as we work within a more prioritized budget,” said NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. “We are working closely with the Administration to ensure that America continues to lead the way in space exploration, advancing progress on key goals, including the Moon and Mars.”
NASA Cuts Almost Half of Science Budget
On May 2, the Trump administration released its 2026 “skinny budget” request, outlining its funding plans for the next fiscal year — including a proposal to slash NASA’s science budget by 47 percent to $3.9 billion.
According to new documents, the cuts would cancel several major missions and research efforts. The Mars Sample Return project, which aims to bring back material collected by the Perseverance rover, would be scrapped entirely. The New Horizons mission — which famously flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now studying the outer solar system — would also be cancelled, along with Juno, the probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
Projects involving long-running Mars orbiters like Mars Odyssey and MAVEN would be terminated, and NASA’s planned collaboration on the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover, set to launch in 2028 to search for signs of life, would be shelved.
“In total, this budget aims to cancel 41 science projects — fully a third of NASA’s science portfolio,” The Planetary Society said in a statement about the new budget documents. “These are unique projects that would require billions of new spending to replace.”
Last week, seven former heads of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate issued a joint letter to Congress condemning the White House’s proposed 47 percent cuts. They urged the House appropriations committee “to preserve US leadership in space exploration and reject the unprecedented cuts to space science concocted by the White House’s Budget Director, Russ Vought.”
“The economics of these proposed cuts ignore a fundamental truth: investments in NASA science have been and are a powerful driver of the U.S. economy and technological leadership,” the letter read.
The former officials pointed to past breakthroughs, writing: “In our former roles leading NASA’s space science enterprise, we consistently saw skilled teams innovate in the face of seemingly impossible goals, including landing a car-sized rover on Mars with pinpoint precision, build a massive telescope that can unfold in the vacuum of space to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, design and operate a spacecraft hardy enough to survive temperatures of many thousands of degrees at the Sun, inspiring young and old alike worldwide by the stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and pioneering the use of small satellites for science.”
They also warned the cuts could be to Beijing’s advantage. “Global space competition extends far past Moon and Mars exploration,” they wrote. “The Chinese space science program is aggressive, ambitious, and well-funded. It is proposing missions to return samples from Mars, explore Neptune, monitor climate change for the benefit of the Chinese industry and population, and peer into the universe – all activities that the FY 2026 NASA budget proposal indicates the US will abandon.”
What Happens Next
The administration is yet to announce its next choice for a permanent NASA administrator, but Duffy will replace Janet Petro, a veteran NASA executive, who was appointed acting head of the agency by the Trump administration in January.
Duffy’s move to NASA is not the only example of Cabinet reshuffling under Trump. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, currently holds two extra roles – acting national security adviser and interim national archivist.
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