Trump Cancels Jared Isaacman's Nomination

Thanks to a Comment from jeff d to yesterday's post about Blue Origin's CEO I learned that the White House has pulled the nomination of Jared Isaacman to be NASA Administrator.  

There's no real answer to the question of why this was done, but it's not hard to have come to the conclusion that something wasn't going right in the process they're going through to get him appointed.  It's June already (UTC) as I write and people like Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and a list as long as my arm went through similar processes and were approved months ago.  An easy example is Isaacman's passing a senate committee vote on April 30; he won 19-9 with the "nay" votes coming from Democratic senators.  They seemed to view attacking Isaacman as attacking Musk and Trump. 

Something was clearly interfering with the process and a website called Semafor.com broke the story that Eric Berger summed up in the second link up above.  They quote what White House spokesperson Liz Huston (whom I've never heard of but that isn't saying much - maybe she works weekends) released in their statement was:

“The Administrator of NASA will help lead humanity into space and execute President Trump’s bold mission of planting the American flag on the planet Mars. It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon.” 

Berger interpreted that to mean he wasn't in close enough agreement with Trump's political agenda, but the more I read, the more it sounds like the issue was they believed that the nomination was going to be stuck in the senate because of the hate that has been directed against Elon Musk.  To quote Eric Berger at Ars Technica:

Musk was a key factor behind Isaacman's nomination as NASA administrator, and with his backing, Isaacman was able to skip some of the party purity tests that have been applied to other Trump administration nominees. One mark against Isaacman is that he had recently donated money to Democrats. He also indicated opposition to some of the White House's proposed cuts to NASA's science budget.

Musk's role in the DOGE effort was strangely controversial, attracting enemies from both opponents of Trump's MAGA agenda as well as from inside the administration.  One would have had to have slept through the 130 days Musk was a "Special Government Employee" and running DOGE to not have noticed the relentless attacks on Tesla factories, dealerships, and randomly encountered Tesla drivers.  There were also stories about threats against other things Musk runs. 

That quote from White House spokesperson Huston says that Trump will announce a replacement for Isaacman soon.  There's "wailing and gnashing of teeth" from supporters as Berger continued:

Isaacman is generally well-liked in the space community and is known to care deeply about space exploration. Officials within the space agency—and the larger space community—hoped that having him as NASA's leader would help the agency restore some of these cuts.

Now? "NASA is f---ed," one current leader in the agency told Ars on Saturday.

"NASA's budget request is just a going-out-of-business mode without Jared there to innovate," a former senior NASA leader said.

Further, Berger quotes "other sources" who provide a name for the likely replacement, a former US Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast  but then criticizes General Kwast as only coming from the Military side and being far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield than on seeing cooperation and peaceful exploration.