Sean Duffy, Anne Gorsuch, and the Final Frontier

Can Duffy bring NASA back down to earth?

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Wisconsin’s own Sean Duffy to be interim head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sent environmental headbangers into orbit last week—as if progressive brains weren’t already oxygen-deprived enough—but truth be told they had been sitting on the launch pad ever since Trump tapped Duffy to head the Department of Transportation.

When Trump chose Duffy to run the DOT, progressives complained he had never managed a large agency before, as if Pete Buttigieg had (and, no, being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, doesn’t qualify).

With the NASA gig, though, the progressive press was apoplectic. Most headlines referred to Duffy as a former reality TV star rather as the current DOT secretary and former U.S. congressman representing northern Wisconsin. Rolling Stone weighed in with this headline: “Man Afraid to Ride Subway named head of NASA.”

I have no idea what they are talking about except to say it’s perfectly reasonable to believe the New York subways are far more dangerous than being blasted into space sitting atop a rocket. Believe me, I’ve lived in New York City, and it doesn’t take rocket science to immediately figure out you’re in a hellscape on the subway, as Duffy has described it.

Of course, progressives had other reasons for calling him out. He’s not a scientist, they huffed. He has no space background, they puffed. Worst of all, they hyperventilated, he’s a Donald Trump loyalist!

Maybe it’s just me but I think that his much-maligned loyalty to the president of the United States is the number 1 reason Sean Duffy is the perfect person to lead the space agency in the interim, just as he’s the perfect person to run the the DOT, the most effective antidote to the woke poison of Buttigieg.

Progressives like to cast their stones at the glass house of total loyalty to Trump the person, but the loyalists are actually loyal to Trump’s agenda, and thus to the agenda of the elected president of the United States, and thus to the people of the United States. To be accused of being a loyalist to the administration’s agenda is to be awarded a badge of honor. It signifies fidelity to the people, not to bureaucrats.

Yeah, read all about it, the progressives scream that experts should rule and that science is real. Science is real, except in the hot kitchen of stewing progressivism, where it is cooked to taste.

As we shall see in a moment, the so-called experts are less experts than they are ideological carnival barkers who mutter that the science is settled on such things as climate change—which has become a progressive Titanic that NASA administrators have all too happily boarded with a non-refundable ticket.

Unfortunately for them, science is never settled. It is by definition an ongoing inquiry, an eternal search for truth that constantly challenges consensus in hopes of overturning it or, alternatively, of strengthening its foundations. Even then, the foundations never settle finally.

The job of an administrator is not to hide ideological agendas behind the curtain of consensus but to competently hire and manage an array of diverse scientific expertise to advance the agency’s scientific search and to marry it compatibly to the will of the people. An administrator is a facilitator of democracy, not a feudal king.

This role Sean Duffy is imminently qualified to do, and so are others leading the Trump administration’s agencies. Brooke Rollins, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, Linda McMahon, and on and on: Duffy and compatriots are a unique and refreshing breed of agency leaders, a set of people devoted to the mission of establishing the minimally necessary administrative mechanics for constitutional governance and executive functioning, and nothing more.

Their mission is to maintain an effective but skinny administrative scaffolding that upholds and secures the law and is ultimately dismantled, rather than to build a fortress that overpowers the law and becomes an end in and of itself, i.e., the bureaucracy. It strives to expand and invite disagreement and diversity of opinion; it seeks to give the wisdom of the people a seat at the table side by side with academic expertise; it seeks to manage and use the resulting scientific knowledge in a way that will both satisfy the ambitions of the citizenry and benefit the public interest.

It lives in a tiny house, always on call for democracy but bereft of any lawmaking or judicial power. Its whole life literally is—and should be—pleasing you and me, within the protected and sacrosanct boundaries of scientific integrity and constitutional rights.

And that’s what why progressives hate these new administrators so much. Even more so because, in the era of the modern administrative state, no other set of cabinet officials has been of this mindset.

Not the Grand Old Days, or Party

Prior to Trump, the appointed cabinet had for all practical purposes served as an extension of the bureaucratic state, or, when cabinet officials did dare to push the popular agenda of an elected president, they were undercut and canceled by various uniparty alliances.

When Democrats are in power, much of the politically appointed administration obviously comes from the deep state itself, or they are its mentors and unabashed cheerleaders. Under Biden, commerce secretary Gina Raimondo was a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Norris Cochran, who sat at or near the helm of power inside the Department Health and Human Services, was career civil service; and Tom Vilsack returned for a second run under Biden from the Obama administration, where he not only waged an environmental war on agriculture but on school children with his and Michelle Obama’s school lunch nutrition standards.

That Democratic administrations are riddled with deep state civil service veterans and globalists is new to no one. The question becomes, why have Republican administrations failed to slow the juggernaut of the large bureaucracy?

The answer is because, until Trump, much of the Republican Party was controlled by the second branch of the globalist family—a GOP wing populated by warmongering refugees who had been exiled long ago from the McGovern Democratic Party and by glittering globalist corporate multinationals whose interests aligned more with bureaucratic one-worlders than it did with populist conservatives. Indeed over the years many burdensome business regulations were supported by the largest global corporations as a way to eliminate competition, and the concept of open borders was met with a wink and a shrug.

We have to go all the way back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan to find a conservative really willing to take on a bloated and unresponsive bureaucracy. The Bush-Cheney years offer no comparison here, neoconservatives ruled the roost during their tenure—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton. Wolfowitz served not only as Bush’s deputy defense secretary but as president of the World Bank—you don’t get more globalist than that—and he was one of the earliest returnees to the Democratic Party, proclaiming his support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 before denying it later.

Nowadays most of the neoconservative universe has re-migrated to the Democratic Party from whence it came. Given the more recent political proclivities of the Cheneys and the Bushes—not to mention Bill Kristol—one could analyze the Bush years as a hawkish Democratic regime rather than a truly Republican one.

At the very least it made no pretense of opposing the federal bureaucracy.

Neither did George Herbert Walker Bush. His Republicanism was marked by obsessive support for the United Nations, more so than any previous president, even going so far as to re-imagine the slogan, “new world order.” So we have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan to find any real attempt to cut the bureaucracy and to put into place a cabinet that would help him do it.

Enter Anne Gorsuch, the mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. Reagan meant what he said when he promised to curb the size and scope of bureaucratic power. When he was elected, he stirred a firestorm in a speech—to bureaucrats at the American Society for Public Administration, of all places—by declaring war on the bureaucracy. It was mild compared to Trumpian language but noble for its day and intent: “My dealings with the bureaucracy showed me their first priorities were maintaining the status quo in their agencies, and they were certainly not Republicans.”

Reagan may have been mild-mannered but his actions were not. The president met the challenge of a heavily organized and increasingly aggressive federal union workforce when he fired striking air traffic controllers on the spot.

In 1988, Reagan assessed what his goal had been:

Reagan had indeed eyed the size of the federal bureaucracy, and, to help with the mission at one of the largest bureaucracies, he tapped Anne Gorsuch to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch immediately set to work, slashing the EPA budget by 22 percent and cutting regulations at a quick pace.

But Gorsuch was a lightning rod, and the uniparty put a target on her back early on. During her 22-month tenure, she became the first cabinet-level federal official to be held in contempt of Congress for withholding documents (on Reagan’s orders) about hazardous waste sites—74 documents out of 787,000 pages, all of which related to pending enforcement actions. Fifty-five Republicans joined in the disgraceful melee.

Environmental advocates may have had their knives out for Gorsuch but so did special interests who were firing away at Gorsuch because many were invested in the some of the regulations she was trying to claw back.

After Gorsuch resigned, Reagan effectively threw in the towel on the EPA front and appointed insider William Ruckelshaus to take her place. Ruckelshaus was, of course, the very first EPA administrator, appointed by Nixon after he created the agency. The deep state was now back in control; order had been restored. Gorsuch later described her view of the deep state, or swamp, this way: “Washington was too small to be a state but too large to be an asylum for the mentally deranged.”

She proclaimed that her only ‘crime’ was her loyalty.

NASA and its moonbeams

All of which brings us back to Duffy. This time around, the person (people) being sent in to tame the bureaucracies, and the president who is sending them, has a mandate from the people. Back in the good old days of Reagan, there was not yet a burning popular will for rolling back the bureaucratic state. Reagan was actually ahead of his time.

Now there is such a mandate, delivered in the last election, but it won’t be easy, and it won’t happen if still existing uniparty special interests—what RFK Jr. calls the corrupt merger of corporate and state power—have anything to say about it.

Duffy does have his work cut out for him. NASA is one of the wokest of the woke agencies, and its climate change follies alone made it a candidate to just be shut down.

Earlier this year, an Open The Books report on NASA showed just how woke the agency had become. The report, “Ground Control to Major Waste,” alleged that, in addition to going off mission—way off mission—it had taken “a giant leap” toward DEI.

Among other things, the report revealed that NASA spent $24 billion in fiscal year 2024, most of which ($14.6 billion) was on contracts. Accounting for inflation, the report states, agency spending stayed relatively steady in the decades following the moon landing.

Then there was DEI.

“The Biden administration worked to embed divisive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology into every aspect of the federal bureaucracy, including NASA,” the report stated. “The agency was required to make DEI a part of hiring, promotion, and programmatic considerations, and its contractors and grantees were pressured to do the same.”

Get this, according to the report: “‘DEI activities at NASA included a talk about a book that called Thanksgiving a ‘day of mourning,’ and a nation-wide road tour for screening a NASA documentary about black astronauts called ‘The Color of Space.’”

It even had a Diversity Ambassador! As for mission, NASA’s Artemis project to return to the moon was the crown jewel of woke. Getting back to the moon was only secondary, NASA announced, the real goal was to send the first woman and person of color there. Never mind if they were the most qualified.

So progressives worry about the qualifications of who is directing NASA’s administration but could care less about the qualifications of those flying its spaceships.

While engineering takes up the greatest portion of NASA salaries, the Open the Books report showed other spending included $145 million for “miscellaneous administration,” $42 million for human resources, and $25 million for public affairs.

“Many of NASA’s top grantees and contractors are universities with deep commitments to DEI, including through ‘land acknowledgments’ lamenting the existence of the United States,” the report continued. “NASA spent around $21 billion a year in grants from fiscal year 2021-2024. Most of the spending was highly scientific in nature, although a few projects, like $287,791 to use NASA data ‘with local organizations to advance environmental justice’ explicitly embedded DEI.”

NASA has recently launched a new climate mission to study the ocean and atmosphere, and most of its projects now tilt toward confirming climate change rather than space exploration. And so it was with a heavy heart that Biden’s outgoing NASA chief, Bill Nelson, announced the first firings after Trump took office.

“The first person that was fired at NASA two months ago was the Chief Scientist and Chief Climate Officer,” Nelson told SpaceNews. “I think we need to be concerned about that.”

No, Bill, I don’t think we do.

That’s because the now-fired chief scientist, hired in 2022, is a climate-obsessed ideological partisan, a chief contributor over the years to the UN’s sham Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, who made her way into NASA’s orbit from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute. When her appointment was announced, new chief scientist Katherine Calvin vowed to make climate change the agency’s top priority.

“When people hear NASA, I want them to think of climate science alongside planetary science,” Calvin told CNBC. “All of the chief scientists of NASA have had specialty areas. Mine is climate.”

The thing is, Calvin wasn’t interested in actually pursuing new science in the climate field. It was to bring a set of flawed left-wing propositions into the agency and then propagandize them. In 2022, the agency put its mission right out there on X with a blatantly unproven and irresponsible assertion, which could only be made by completely ignoring contradictory evidence: “The climate change we see is the result of human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels—adding greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, where they trap more heat. Since about 1850, humans have raised atmospheric CO2 by nearly 50%.”

Human-caused climate change was everything—not some of it, not most of it, but all of it. Forget solar variability, internal natural cycles and oscillations, volcanic eruptions, it’s all us. That was NASA’s science.

Far from assembling a team of scientists to advance the cause, Calvin told CNBC that her role would be “communicating that science and connecting it to other agencies, to the public.”

Never mind that NASA scientists should have been focused on the planetary science and not climate change—that’s presumably why it’s called a space agency—the climate science she did pursue was straight up baloney.

And Bill Nelson was cheering her on. That’s why we need administrators, not “scientists” at the head of agencies—to represent the people. Calvin’s gone, thankfully, but she was just the tip of the iceberg at NASA. Duffy’s job is to cleanse the agency and put it back on course. It’s up to the non-scientist to put real science back into the agency.

Trump no doubt tapped Duffy because he was already performing that mission well over at the DOT. He had only just landed at the DOT when he signed a “Woke Rescission” memorandum, directing agency officials “to identify and eliminate all Biden-era programs, policies, activities, rules, and orders that promote climate change activism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, racial equity, gender identity policies, environmental justice, and other partisan objectives.”

He also signed an order ensuring that all DOT policies, grants, loans, and actions were based on sound economic principles, positive cost-benefit analyses, and pro-economic growth priorities, and he moved quickly to rescind the Biden-Harris administration’s rule requiring state transportation departments to measure and establish declining targets for carbon dioxide emissions on federally supported highways.

“Today’s actions mark an important step in restoring commonsense governance and merit-based policies at DOT,” Duffy said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are focused on eliminating excessive regulations that have hindered economic growth, increased costs for American families, and prioritized far-left agendas over practical solutions.The American people deserve an efficient, safe, and pro-growth transportation system based on sound decision-making, not political ideologies.”

That’s the same mission he will pursue at NASA, and it’s a long-time coming.

No doubt Duffy ended up in a key role in the administration because of his work—under-appreciated and under-noticed—in Congress attempting to oversee and corral bureaucrats, especially Elizabeth Warren’s pet monster, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). That agency’s mission is exactly the opposite of its name, and Duffy knew it long ago. He constantly warned that the mainstream press had underreported privacy issues and potential dangers of the CFPB’s massive financial data collection apparatus.

When it comes down to it, Duffy said, even the National Security Agency had a more plausible reason than the CFPB for wanting information.

“If you look at the NSA, the NSA will tell you they are trying to protect you from terrorists,” the congressman said. “Now I think they’re taking too much information, but they will still give you a good cause as to why they are doing it. But with CFPB, why are they taking that information? What reason do they have that is as good as protecting us from terrorists that they want all our financial information and data?”

Back then, Duffy introduced legislation that would require the CFPB to get a consumer’s permission to take his or her information, and he pointed out that to control overreaching federal bureaucracies, you have to control their funding.

“Power and control over the agencies comes through money, s funding levels for a certain amount of time,” Duffy said. “That robs Congress of its funding leverage over the agencies. …So if we go back to a regular order of budget and appropriations, we would re-empower the Congress to say, ‘OK EPA, or OK national forests, your money is on the line unless you are more responsive to the needs and concerns we have in northern Wisconsin and the impacts that you have on our ability to put food on our table and a roof over our heads.’”

That’s the same message he is now delivering to NASA: OK NASA, your money and your jobs are on the line unless you are responsive to the needs of the people. Only now he’s delivering that message as the head of NASA, as the people’s executive representative to that agency.

It’s about time, and expect NASA to splash down to earth again real soon.