Isaacman Wants to Restore NASA’s Core Competencies

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman issued a directive today to restore the agency’s “core competencies” in order to fulfill President Trump’s December 2025 Executive Order on Ensuring American Space Superiority. The directive identifies actions to be taken within either 30 days or 60 days by Center Directors and other top NASA leadership to begin expanding a strong core of civil servants strengthened by contractors and complemented by international and commercial partners.

Isaacman is marking his first 50 days as NASA Administrator. It’s been busy. Congress passed and Trump signed into law NASA’s FY2026 appropriations bill that keeps the agency funded at roughly its FY2025 level instead of the 24.3 percent cut Trump proposed last summer.  Crew-11 made an unexpected return from the International Space Station because one of the crew members was ill and NASA and its contractor teams conducted a Wet Dress Rehearsal of the SLS/Orion system that soon will take astronauts to the Moon.

Amidst all that, Isaacman visited all of NASA’s Field Centers around the country to hear from the workforce to get input directly from them. In a video message today, he said this directive builds on what he learned.

After 50 days on the job, visits to every NASA center, a dozen town halls, and reviewing thousands of workforce submissions, it is clear there is much we can do to better empower our people and focus resources on the most pressing objectives.

Getting back to the Moon means… pic.twitter.com/q8vBaY3QHz

— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) February 6, 2026

The text of the internal document was provided to SpacePolicyOnline.com by NASA.

Workforce Directive: Restoring NASA’s Core Competencies

Background

NASA’s ability to deliver on its mission has become increasingly dependent on external vendors and contractors for core functions and workforce talent—from engineering and operations to manufacturing and repair. While partnerships remain vital, this trend has eroded internal capabilities, increased program risk, reduced flexibility in addressing emergent technical challenges, and added well more than a billion dollars in annual overhead—diverting resources from science and discovery.

Factors contributing to this reliance include concerns over exceeding artificial civil servant hiring ceilings, and assumptions that outsourcing would provide greater workforce flexibility. Even if these assumptions hold in some cases, the overall effect deprives NASA of critical institutional knowledge, and limits resources essential for mission success.

As a result, it is not surprising that multiple programs have experienced suboptimal outcomes in cost and schedule. Multiple prime contractors, hundreds of sub-contractors, tens of thousands of contract employees, and duplicative layers of management create complexity and inefficiency. Variances in policies, tools, and systems across this spectrum further challenge budgets, timelines, and outcomes.

To achieve the President’s national space policy and maintain U.S. leadership in space exploration, NASA must urgently restore and retain in-house engineering, operational, and scientific excellence, and reclaim technical autonomy. This directive establishes actions to rebuild internal talent, strengthen contractual provisions, and foster a culture of technical resilience.

Vision

NASA will expand with a strong core of civil servants, staffed and equipped to lead the most complex engineering and operational challenges, ensuring expertise, resilience, agility, and innovation in every mission. This includes the ability to build and repair critical components to reduce external dependencies when necessary. Restoring and sustaining these core competencies is essential to steward taxpayer resources, align investments with agency priorities, and ensure mission success.

This foundation will be strengthened by contractors in non-core areas and for surge requirements, complemented by our extensive network of international and commercial partners. Together, we will deliver on NASA’s world-changing mission of science, exploration, and discovery.

1. Directive Actions

NASA recognizes that contractors have and will continue to play a vital role in achieving mission objectives. This directive focuses on correcting over-reliance on outsourced engineering and staffing that diminishes NASA’s core competencies and resources essential to agency priorities. The future state aims to use contracted workforce primarily for limited-term assignments, surge staffing, and specialized functions outside NASA’s core competencies.

Within 30 days, Center Directors, Mission Directorate leadership, and the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer shall:

• Conduct a Workforce Assessment: Identify outsourced or missing technical and operational expertise and provide a proposal to convert core roles to civil service. Categorize proposal by priority, mapping to core competency and current contracting mechanisms. Emphasize solutions that enable mission execution without introducing additional redundant layers of management.
• Conduct a Work Assessment: Identify engineering, operational, scientific, manufacturing, and other mission-critical work currently outsourced, and provide a proposal for what should be brought in-house, aligned with the workforce assessment.

Within 60 days, the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, Office of Procurement, and Office of the Chief Financial Officer shall:

• Develop Transition Strategy: Consolidate workforce assessments and create an implementation plan to convert or add targeted roles to civil service, addressing contract changes, renegotiations or terminations, timelines, and cost implications.
• Establish Rapid Onboarding Process: Implement streamlined process that ensures candidates can be rapidly brought into civil servant positions without disrupting operational capacity, minimizing gaps in mission-critical support.
• Strengthen the Talent Pipeline: In collaboration with the Office of Personnel Management, develop strategies to attract industry and academic talent and embed civil servants with industry partners to accelerate learning and knowledge transfer aligned with national space policy objectives.
• Enhance Training Programs: Assess and develop internal training and mentorship initiatives to ensure continuity of knowledge and technical depth across generations of NASA engineers, operations personnel, and technicians.
• Focus Internship Opportunities: Develop a plan to expand the current internship program with a focus on standardizing and enhancing experience, to develop in-house technical talent focused on the highest priority agency requirements.

2. Strengthen Framework for Technical Autonomy

Within 30 days, the Office of Procurement shall:

• Ensure Repair and Operation Autonomy: Incorporate right-to-repair provisions in all future and applicable existing contracts, guaranteeing NASA access to specifications, parts, tools, schematics, software, and technical documentation necessary for internal manufacturing, repair, and operations.
• Remove Restrictive Clauses: Eliminate contract language requiring NASA-fabricated replacement hardware to be returned to vendors for inspection after delivery of out-of-spec hardware.
• Address Intellectual Property Barriers: To the extent reasonable under existing and ongoing procurements, review and propose modifications to eliminate IP restrictions that prevent NASA from performing internal repairs or redesigns, as needed to meet urgent Presidential space policy objectives.

Within 60 days, center directors shall:

• Propose Makerspaces at Each Center: develop plan to create a makerspace at each center to enable rapid prototyping and proposal development. Include an assessment of potential funding mechanisms, such as sponsorships from partners and critical vendors, to support implementation and sustainability.

This Directive does not reflect any intent or commitment, implied or otherwise, to take any action regarding any particular existing or future contract with the agency.

Jared Isaacman

NASA Administrator

 

Coupled with strong congressional support in the appropriations bill, the directive likely will be welcome news to a NASA workforce dispirited by the Trump Administration’s actions last year. About 4,000 of NASA’s 17,500 person workforce took the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) or early retirement options that were offered. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology rather than a civil servant facility like the others, laid off another 550 workers on top of two layoffs in 2024.  While NASA escaped the severe Reductions-in-Force (RIFs) at other science agencies like NSF, NOAA and NIH, three key offices were closed with the loss of the agency’s Chief Scientist, Chief Economist, and Chief Technologist.

The directive is somewhat surprising given the current trend towards reducing government workers and relying more on the private sector, but Isaacman believes this will save money and improve NASA’s posture to ensure America remains preeminent in space as required by Trump’s Executive Order.