Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is adding another role to his current gig, for which he has no qualifications, as interim NASA chief—a position in which he is similarly unqualified.
We are all being forced to see Duffy cosplay as an astronaut because President Donald Trump and Elon Musk got in a slap fight. One of the many pieces of fallout from that breakup was Trump’s pulling Jason Isaacman as his NASA nominee to spite Musk, who picked Isaacman.
Just think: Duffy will bring the same gravitas and capability to NASA that he has brought to the crises at the Federal Aviation Administration—blaming President Joe Biden, moving Jesus out of the basement, muttering like a weirdo about how everything at the FAA went to hell because you can no longer say “cockpit.”
To be fair, Duffy was always going to be out of his depth. His ”Real World” experience has not exactly translated to actual real world experience. But—like so many others in the Trump administration—what he lacks in skill, he makes up for in pugnaciousness. Duffy is happiest when he goes to his safe space, Fox News, to raise the alarm about how the New York City Subway is now basically just ”The Warriors”. Hopefully he isn’t as afraid of spaceflight as he is the mere thought of public transit.
It isn’t clear if Duffy’s time playing boss means that he will oversee the imminent decimation of the agency, slated to shed more than 2,000 employees. Unlike Duffy, those people have decades of relevant and specialized experience, and the loss to NASA will be catastrophic.
For whatever reason, Trump has an utter disinterest in NASA at the moment. During the Trump-Musk bromance, it looked like the real goal was to let Musk privatize NASA and turn it into a money machine for SpaceX, but that dream is dead. Hence, treating running one of the most beloved, iconic, and scientifically complex agencies in the United States like driving for Uber to make a few bucks.
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Take Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who got his high-level post because he was one of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys. After Trump ousted the librarian of Congress as part of his war on DEI, he put Blanche in that role, too. Sure, why not?
There’s no doubt that Duffy is hoping his sojourn at NASA will not end in mysterious ignominy, as when FBI Director Kash Patel lost his night job running the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Some folks just have trouble holding down two jobs.
All of these guys are pikers compared to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Besides being in charge of U.S. foreign policy, he’s also the national security adviser, the acting archivist, and the acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Then again, that may have changed even by the time you read this. But rest assured that Trump will continue throwing top government jobs around as patronage—or punishment.