Maureen

You are moving to a different point now, which is fine. But I want you to know that I was respectful in my reply, as I have been to the critics. You were not correct about the public display of the Moon rocks or about prior presidents having rocks in the Oval Office. Now you have pivoted to the budget request. The President submitted a budget request that challenged NASA to do more with less. I provided testimony on the budget because, as you would see in OIG reports, there are examples where NASA was not the best at resource allocation and outcomes suffered. But ultimately, Congress appropriated funding, as is its responsibility. Then we had a year like 2026: the Artemis II mission went very well and we immediately press on to Artemis III, not wasting time or money, six astrophysics missions set records; we held “too big to fail” programs accountable for being over budget and behind schedule; and we launched new initiatives in a logical, iterative way, like Moon Base and SR-1 Freedom. A flagship mission like Roman launched ahead of schedule. X-planes are actually flying again (and on their way to KSC at this moment). We have dramatically rebuilt the workforce, added thousands of civil servants, and put our machine shops back to building hardware. We have taken control of our destiny and put NASA back in the driver seat. And as a result, we have a President who has clearly taken notice and is showing a lot of interest in America’s space program, from Artemis to Roman. This is how you go from being asked to do more with less to being asked to do more with more.