Isaacman’s “NASA Force” Envisions Term-Limited Industry Positions in NASA

Four weeks after announcing that he wants to restore NASA’s core competencies, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said today that includes recruiting “technical talent” from industry to join the agency for roughly 2-year terms. NASA and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) are working together to bring this “NASA Force” idea to fruition.

Isaacman revealed the plans at the A16Z American Dynamism Summit and posted about it later on X before publicly sharing the outlines of the concept during an interview with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan.

Today, we’re launching NASA Force with @USOPM.

Returning to the Moon requires restoring core competencies in our civil servant workforce.

This program will recruit top aerospace, software, systems, and other critical technical talent for approximately 2-year terms at NASA. This… pic.twitter.com/D54MBgVGIb

— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) March 3, 2026

In the CNBC interview, Isaacman said he and OPM Director Scott Kupor made the announcement jointly at the summit today. Isaacman’s contention is that NASA’s core competencies “have been eroded or lost over the years” and the way to build them back is to bring “thousands of people back into the organization, some from contractors, some term-based appointments from industry” in order to achieve the goal of getting astronauts back on the Moon in 2028.

Asked by Brennan how he expects to “lure the top talent” from industry, Isaacman said it will attract professionals who want to serve their country for a fixed period of time.

“Scott Kupor at OPM has already got that figured out when he helped us build this NASA Force, because these are not necessarily jobs that are coming to NASA to build a lifelong career. They’re coming in in term-based appointments. These are professionals from across America’s most advanced technological corporations that say I want to serve my country, I want to make a difference, I’ve got a year, two years, three years, term-based appointments, I want to come in, help elevate the talent within the agency.” Jared Isaacman

There’s no shortage of “kids who want to grow up and work at NASA,” but right now “we need some of that talent from industry to come in, short periods of time, and help season our workforce, that’s exactly what NASA Force is about.”

[Update: NASA issued a press release on Wednesday, March 4, with a few more details including that this is part of OPM’s U.S. Tech Force initiative to “recruit elite technical professionals into federal service, embed them at partner agencies to modernize systems, accelerate innovation, and strengthen mission delivery.”]

This interest in ensuring a robust NASA workforce is a sharp change from a year ago when President Trump’s DOGE effort, led by Elon Musk, was busy eliminating government workers. About 4,000 NASA employees, roughly 20 percent of the workforce, left through the Deferred Resignation Program or early retirement options that were offered. Another 550 were laid off at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, on top of two sets of layoffs there in 2024.

Isaacman wasn’t at NASA then. He’s been Administrator only since December 18.   The workforce initiative announced on February 6 and this one today seem primarily related to ensuring American astronauts are back on the Moon in 2028 before Trump leaves office — and before China lands taikonauts there. Last Friday Isaacman revamped the Artemis program, adding an earth-orbiting test flight in 2027 as a prelude to landing on the Moon at least once and possibly twice in 2028.

Then and again today he criticized the low cadence of Artemis launches and the need to get back to launching as often as NASA did during the 1960s era of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to ensure engineers who work on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket don’t lose “muscle memory.” Only one Artemis launch has taken place so far — the uncrewed Artemis I test flight at the end of 2022. The next is getting ready to launch as soon as next month — the crewed Artemis II test flight around the Moon. Until Friday, the third Artemis flight wouldn’t have been until 2028. Now there will be one next year and perhaps two in 2028.

The Boeing-built SLS is the only rocket that can send astronauts to the Moon right now, although others are in development. Landing on the Moon also requires Lockheed Martin’s Orion crew capsule, spacesuits being built by Axiom Space, and a Human Landing System (HLS) to get from lunar orbit down to and back from the surface. SpaceX and Blue Origin have HLS contracts.

 

This article has been updated.