WASHINGTON — Jared Isaacman made clear he believes his nomination to be administrator of NASA was pulled by the White House because of his ties to Elon Musk.
Appearing on an episode of the All-In Podcast published June 4, Isaacman said he was informed by the White House May 30 that President Trump was withdrawing his nomination to lead the space agency, a move that became public the next day. The podcast appearance provided his first public comments about the withdrawn nomination other than social media posts.
“I got a call Friday of last week that the president decided to go in a different direction,” he recalled. “It was a real bummer.” He added that he did not expect the decision to become public until after the weekend in order to notify “a number of parties in government.”
Isaacman said that the unnamed individual who called him to with the news said only that the president “decided to go in a different direction” but that he assumed he lost the nomination because he was associated with Elon Musk. Isaacman had been a customer of SpaceX, commanding two private astronaut missions, and Musk is widely understood to have advocated for him to lead NASA during the presidential transition last fall.
“I don’t need to play dumb on this,” he said. “I don’t think that the timing was much of a coincidence, that there were other changes going on the same day.” Musk marked his formal end as a “special government employee” serving as de facto head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency on May 30.
The relationship between Trump and Musk had reportedly become strained before Musk’s formal departure, and since then Musk has been critical of a budget resolution bill backed by President Trump that is currently being considered by the Senate. Musk argues the bill would result in a major increase in the national debt.
“There were some people that had some axes to grind, I guess, and I was a good, visible target,” Isaacman added.
He rejected one explanation that Trump decided to withdraw the nomination after learning that Isaacman had, in the recent past, donated to Democratic candidates and offices. “That was not a new development. You just Google and they’re all public,” he noted. Those donations were publicly known for many months and, he noted, included in responses to a Senate Commerce Committee questionnaire about his nomination.
Asked by the podcast’s host, David Friedberg, if the withdrawn nomination was a “shot at Elon,” Isaacman responded that “people can draw their own conclusions.” However, he added, “I think the direction people are going, or thinking on this, seems to check out to me.”
The White House has not provided more details on its decision to withdraw Isaacman’s nomination. Asked about the decision at a June 3 press conference, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president had the right to remove nominees “if he so chooses” but did not elaborate.
“The president wants to ensure that all of his nominees are aligned fully with the America First mission of this administration. And again, he will be announcing a replacement very soon,” she said.
Plans for NASA
The hour-long interview also discussed what Isaacman had hoped to accomplish had he been confirmed by the Senate. He said that when he was being considered for the NASA nomination last fall, he prepared a one-page document outlining his goals.
“It centered on, in this kind of environment, budgets aren’t getting bigger. We do have to do more with less. The agency is doing a lot of ‘littles’: a lot of things that other agencies, departments, companies are capable of doing,” he said. “That’s not why the taxpayers fund NASA. NASA is funded to do the near impossible that no one else can do.”
He said he wanted NASA to focus on “needle-mover” programs. “That’s leading in the high ground of space. Let’s complete our lunar obligations, because that’s a whole other story with China. At the same time, parallel the capabilities to get to Mars, help commercial industry develop the rapidly reusable heavy-lift capability that allows us to go anywhere. Pivot from competing with industry to doing what no company would ever do, which is build nuclear spaceships.”
He also said he wanted to cut back the agency’s bureaucracy. “You have dozens of layers of leadership. Everybody’s got a deputy,” he said. “I would have deleted all of that.”
He made clear he was not a supporter of the Mars Sample Return program, which has suffered from cost and schedule overruns. “The best thing to do is, when the astronauts get there, to bring the samples home,” he said. “Why would we send billions to send a robotic mission when we can put that into commercial industry and accelerate their timeline?”
He added he was a “big fan” of NASA science in general but wanted to push towards smaller missions that would be faster to develop. “Give me 10 $100 million missions a year. Let’s try that, and let’s accept that three fail,” he said. “I was going to introduce ‘time to science’ as a KPI,” or key performance indicator, for those missions.
The scientific community, through the decadal survey process, has generally recommended a mix of small and large missions, arguing that some scientific topics require larger, flagship class missions. Isaacman, though, was critical of the decadal survey process itself, arguing that its 10-year time horizon “is kind of insane.”
Isaacman said in the interview that he has not decided if he will return to spaceflight now that he will no longer lead NASA. The Polaris Dawn mission he commanded last year was intended to be the first of a three-mission program culminating in a Starship flight, but Isaacman said during the confirmation process he would cancel the contracts.
“This is like the first time in 26 years that I’ve really been out of work,” he said. He had stepped down as chief executive of Shift4, the payment processing company he founded, but said he may return in some role, such as executive chairman. “I’ll find something to contribute to, and, man, I love flying and I love space.”
