Why Jared Isaacman’s NASA Nomination Was Always Doomed
NASA, Mars, and the “Best and Brightest” That Never Landed
It’s hard to say whether Jared Isaacman’s nomination was doomed from the start due to his visible ties to Elon Musk — formerly Trump’s closest space ally before that alliance seemed to sour. But if the April 9 Senate Nomination hearing was his moment to convince a skeptical audience that he could independently steer NASA, he didn’t quite stick the landing.
Isaacman, founder of private spaceflight company Polaris and a self-made billionaire, arrived at the hearing as the sole nominee for NASA Administrator. He had the vocal backing of Elon Musk, 28 former NASA astronauts, and even former Administrator Jim Bridenstine. All things considered, it should have been his job to lose.
He lost it.
Maybe it was the politics — perhaps he gave too much to Democrats in the past, or not enough to the right kind of Republicans now. Maybe he was too MAGA, or not MAGA enough. Or maybe it was something more pedestrian: he didn’t really have a plan.
The Rhetoric Without a Rocket
The hearing made one thing clear: Isaacman believes in “the best and the brightest.” He said it four times in two hours and half. He even used the phrase again when the news broke that his nomination would be pulled. It’s a good slogan — especially if you’re trying to gloss over the absence of a concrete roadmap for how to get to the Moon and Mars with the most aggressively slashed NASA budget in six decades.
NASA has always charted its ambitions incrementally: first orbit, then the Moon, and eventually Mars. This is not just bureaucratic pacing — it’s sensible project management. No one (including the Trump administration) ever proposed abandoning the step-by-step strategy in favor of a parallel “Moon and Mars together” approach. That is, until Isaacman. Or was it Musk? The doubt may well linger forever.
Maybe he was too MAGA, or not MAGA enough. Or maybe it was something more pedestrian: he didn’t really have a plan.
So when senators asked, repeatedly, how he would achieve simultaneous Moon and Mars landings under a constrained budget, the answer was a loop: “With the best and the brightest.” It sounded less like a strategy and more like a placeholder for one.
The Budget Problem
You don’t have to dislike Isaacman to admit the hearing was not his finest hour. When asked by Sen. Gary Peters if NASA’s budget cuts would undermine his vision, Isaacman replied that NASA’s current budget was “pretty extraordinary,” and insisted, “I do believe we can do the near impossible.” He repeated that phrase ten times. Unfortunately, soaring optimism alone doesn’t make for reassuring policy. It also felt counterintuitive. Historically, NASA Administrators have always pushed for more funding — not settled for less.
Musk in the Room?
The elephant — or billionaire — in the room was Musk. Or, more precisely, was Musk in that room? At 2:49:00, things turned theatrical when Senator Ed Markey pushed Isaacman to clarify whether Elon Musk had been present when Trump offered him the NASA job at Mar-a-Lago. Isaacman dodged the question, saying only: “I was in the room with the President.”
It was three long minutes of squirming. The evasiveness didn’t do him any favors. At best, it raised eyebrows. At worst, it suggested that Isaacman might be more of an emissary than an executive — a proxy with loyalties split between public service and private patronage.
To be clear, even without Musk Trump seems to be still vocal about Mars, but watching Isaacman struggle to separate his own vision from that of Musk’s did little to reassure senators that he could act with independence.
Lessons in Leadership
In the end, Isaacman may have been rejected for reasons entirely unrelated to the hearing — but the hearing didn’t help. If he is, in fact, a capable leader with a compelling strategy, none of that was apparent during his testimony. The repetition, the vague answers, the over-reliance on slogans — it felt more like a PR loop than a policy argument.
And while America has often flirted with the idea that successful entrepreneurs make good public leaders, history offers cautionary tales. Take Italy, for example — a country that for nearly two decades experimented with the notion that a brilliant entrepreneur could also make an effective head of state. The result was the Berlusconi government, which held office during three separate terms (1994-1995, 2001–2006, and 2008–2011). During his longest mandate, from 2001 to 2006, Italy’s economic growth hovered around an exceptional zero, dipping into recession at points. Government spending expanded, the budget deficit rose from 3.2% to over 4% of GDP, and the much-touted tax cuts never materialized — in fact, taxation increased by over 11% during his five-years tenure. As for competitiveness, Italy dropped from 49th to 53rd place in global rankings by 2005, trailing countries like Brazil, Turkey, and the Philippines.
This is not to suggest that the U.S. and Italy are economically comparable, nor that NASA is equivalent to a national government. But the equation successful entrepreneur = successful public leader has been tested before — and it hasn’t always worked out. Neither for entrepreneurship, nor for leadership.
Why Jared Isaacman’s NASA Nomination Was Always Doomed © 2025 by Emma Gatti is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0