By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee voted on Wednesday to advance President Donald Trump’s nominees to head NASA and to serve as commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission.
Trump’s pick to head the space agency, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, is CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments and a business partner of Elon Musk who has flown to space twice as a private astronaut on Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft.
NASA, like many government agencies, is currently going through a significant restructuring and employees have been offered buyouts to leave.
The panel also approved the nomination of Olivia Trusty, a Senate aide who would give Republicans three votes on the five-member telecom regulator. Some Democrats said they would only support Trusty on the Senate floor as long as they had assurances that the Senate would continue to consider Democratic nominees.
Trump fired both Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission and has also removed Democrats from other independent commissions. U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, said Trump had illegally fired FTC commissioners.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr has an aggressive deregulatory agenda and will need a majority of the commission before he can implement many priorities.
Isaacman, 42, if confirmed, will oversee 18,000 employees and a budget of roughly $25 billion, focused heavily on returning astronauts to the moon’s surface as part of a program called Artemis. Trump started the program during his first term.
Trump and Musk, who spent $250 million in support of Trump’s presidential campaign and pushed for Isaacman’s nomination, have become fixated on Mars as a national priority, raising questions about NASA’s moon program for which billions of dollars have been committed.
SpaceX has roughly $15 billion worth of NASA contracts, offering the agency its only U.S. ride for astronauts to space and a vehicle that will land crews on the moon later this decade.
(Reporting by David Shepardson)
