A brief history.
I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).
This is strange:
According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.
Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.
[Update a while later]
Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.