How a Liquor-Store Assistant Manager Became Trump’s Liaison to NASA
In today’s newsletter, startling discoveries while reporting on Trump’s efforts to remake NASA in his own image, and then:
Illustration by Todd St. John
Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA
David W. Brown
Brown has been writing about NASA and space since 2010.
Usually, when I write about NASA the research points me to primordial asteroids, or icy oceans inside radioactive moons. This is the first NASA story to point me to a Total Wine & More in Palm Beach County, Florida. The Trump Administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are indiscriminately firing federal workers and cancelling contracts, and I wanted to know what DOGE’s presence would precipitate at NASA headquarters.
As I pieced together the story, publishing today, I heard one name more than any other: Darren Bossie. The new White House liaison to NASA, Bossie seems to be an embodiment of Trump in the hallways of the agency’s headquarters. I’d never heard of him. But I knew that who he was would be telling of Trump’s agenda. I found Bossie’s profile on LinkedIn. To my astonishment, he’d spent the bulk of his professional life as an assistant manager of a Total Wine & More. (The NASA community was surprised, too. “Cannot make this stuff up,” someone wrote on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory subreddit.) I called every Total Wine & More location in the area, repeatedly, hoping to speak with someone who remembered him. I talked with many people, but found only one who did.
Details on Darren Bossie were hard to pin down. There was a David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United—yes, that Citizens United, whose 2010 court case upended American democracy by allowing corporations unlimited political spending—and a fervent Trump supporter. I couldn’t find any wedding announcements or obituaries connecting the two men, but my editor, Daniel A. Gross, found the names of David’s parents in the dedication of a book he’d co-authored. Our search of public records finally placed all of them—David, Darren, mom, and dad—at the same address in the nineteen-eighties. The family connection shed some light on Darren Bossie’s sudden rise.
In my fifteen years covering NASA, I’ve never seen its workers so concerned—not just about individual projects, but about the agency’s core values. The Administration wants co-workers to snitch on one another. Employees are removing pride flags for fear of being targeted, and using Signal for everyday correspondence. It’s also remarkable that the White House seemed to preëmpt NASA when we reached out for comment, responding on the agency’s behalf—a first in all my reporting. Musk’s reusable rockets revolutionized the way NASA operates, but his MAGA politics now threaten the agency’s bipartisan support. Space exploration is a human endeavor, and acolytes like Bossie seem to be helping Trump remake NASA in his own image. What will this mean for the final frontier?
Read the story »
Jay Caspian Kang
Illustration by Ben Wiseman
What Gavin Newsom’s Embarrassing Podcast Suggests About the Democratic Party
“This Is Gavin Newsom,” a new podcast from the California governor, is a fairly transparent soft launch for a Presidential run in 2028, Kang argues. In his first five episodes, Newsom has mostly capitulated to right-wing guests, agreeing with them on issues such as trans women competing in sports and the vilification of white men. “Newsom’s gambit, though ill-fated and embarrassing in practice, does come out of a coherent school of liberal thought,” Kang writes. It “seems to take it as a given that Democrats need to actively distance themselves from a whole host of positions that are now associated with the Party.” Will his strategy work? Read the column »
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“Business is bad because no one wants to know the future.”
Cartoon by Amy Hwang
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P.S. The first ever tweet, posted by Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey, was sent on this day in 2006. After Elon Musk bought—and then upended—the platform, Sheon Han reflected on the disastrous takeover. “Wiping out billions in brand value by changing the platform’s name; decimating the developer ecosystem; testing out charging new users for the service,” Han writes. “These decisions seem indistinguishable from acts of self-sabotage.”
Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.
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