Jared Isaacman spent three years auditioning for the NASA administrator job. He wants you to judge him by outcomes, not by how quickly the agency spends money each year.
That is the line he delivered on Face the Nation Sunday morning, while the Artemis II astronauts were roughly halfway to the moon. The White House had released its 2027 budget proposal the day before: $18.8 billion for NASA, down $5.6 billion from the 2026 enacted level, a 23 percent reduction overall, according to the FY2027 budget request. Science programs would absorb the worst of it, facing cuts the Planetary Society called a budget of surrender.
Isaacman supports the request.
"Look, we have $10 billion in supplemental funding that came out of President Trump's signature legislation, the working family tax cut act," Isaacman told Ed O'Keefe. "This is the biggest supplemental investment in NASA since the Kennedy era."
The supplemental money is real. It is also almost entirely committed to human spaceflight, lunar landers, and the Mars-bound nuclear propulsion project Isaacman has made his signature priority. The agency's science divisions, which fund heliophysics, astrophysics, outer solar system missions, and university-based research, are not the beneficiaries.
This is the part of Isaacman's pitch that requires the most careful parsing. During his confirmation hearing last December, he told senators that Earth science "is pretty vitally important," according to Scientific American. In written responses to questions from senators following the hearing, he endorsed funding for early-career scientists and university-based research — a position Sen. Maria Cantwell cited when announcing her support for his confirmation, saying Isaacman "emphasized the importance of developing a pipeline of future scientists, engineers, researchers, [and] astronauts," according to a Commerce Committee press release.
The supplemental money he is pointing to does not restore any of those programs. The $297 million cut to NASA's space technology directorate, $476 million below 2025 levels, falls squarely on the kind of early-career and university work he said he supported.
The budget does add roughly $1 billion for the Artemis program, preserving the lunar lander contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin that Isaacman personally negotiated. Artemis III, the first crewed lunar landing since 1972, remains targeted for 2027. Isaacman said Sunday the mission is "a year away," which is approximately the same timeline NASA has been describing for the past two years.
Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, put the arithmetic plainly to CNN: "There are cuts to outer solar system programs, astrophysics, heliophysics. All things that feed into the human program and enable the human program."
Isaacman was not on the program to argue with that assessment. He was there to explain why the Artemis crew was about to lose comms with Mission Control for 40 minutes on the far side of the moon, and to make the case that the life support and thermal protection systems aboard Orion deserved the attention he was giving them.
The astronauts are doing their jobs. Their administrator is doing his.
