President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the next administrator of NASA.

“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology and exploration,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule.

It was Isaacman’s second trip to space using a SpaceX capsule. He has declined to say how much he’s paid the company for the two flights.

Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.

If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk’s company.

“Isaacman is likely to favor ambitious and innovative commercial projects,” says Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the space business. “Many of those projects could well be executed by SpaceX.”

In fact, in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He’s also been critical of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin award came after NASA gave a multi-billion dollar contract to SpaceX for the same mission.

Farrar says Isaacman would not immediately be able to restructure NASA’s large programs, such as its Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the moon. That’s because many aspects of those programs are dictated by Congress, which sets the budget for the space agency. “The real question for NASA is whether Congress will permit it to abandon legacy projects like SLS so the budget can be redirected to SpaceX,” he says.

SpaceX did not immediately reply to NPR’s request for comment. Through a spokesperson, Isaacman declined to speak to NPR, but in a statement posted to X, he said he was honored to receive the nomination: “With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this,” he wrote. “We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.”

Lawmakers in Montana crossed party lines this week to reject a measure that would have banned a transgender representative from using the women’s bathroom at the state Capitol.

Several Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against the proposal at a meeting of the Joint House and Senate Rules Committees on Tuesday.

The proposed rule would have designated two bathrooms — located between the House and Senate chambers — as male and female and required legislators to use the one that aligned with their sex chromosomes at birth.

“It says what probably shouldn’t need to be said and puts in the rules what probably shouldn’t need to be put in the rules … that the gals’ restroom will be used only by gals and the guys’ restroom will be used only by [guys],” Republican Rep. Jerry Schillinger, who proposed the measure, said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The lawmakers did not name names but implied that the rule was aimed at Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who was elected the state’s first transgender legislator in 2022 and won a second term last month.

This wouldn’t be Montana Republicans’ first time singling out Zephyr: They voted in April 2023 to sanction and silence her from floor debates for breaking decorum, after she said lawmakers who supported a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors would have “blood on your hands.” (While her banishment ended with the 2023 session, she has yet to return since the legislature did not meet in 2024.)

“Understand that we have one representative right now but in the future, we could have many,” Republican Rep. Jedediah Hinkle, a supporter of the measure, said on Tuesday. “This could be an ongoing thing.”

During the nearly 15-minute discussion — in which no women participated — lawmakers in favor of the rule said it would safeguard women’s spaces, while those opposed questioned its utility and how it would be enforced.

Critics also maintained that the accommodations made during the legislature’s last session — adding locks to the nearby bathrooms’ outer doors — had already addressed members’ concerns. And two Republican members worried that the measure itself would be a distraction.

“This particular action will have the effect of making people famous in the national news and will not contribute to the effective conduct of our business,” said Republican Rep. David Bedey, who opposed the bill “reluctantly” despite his personal views on the topic.

The proposal, which needed support from a majority of both committees, passed in the Senate committee but ultimately failed in the House committee by a vote of 10-12. Zephyr celebrated the outcome on social media.

“I’m happy to see that this proposed ban failed and am grateful for my colleagues — particularly my republican colleagues — who recognized this as a distraction from the work we were elected to do,” she posted on X. “I’m ready to represent my constituents & look forward to working on behalf of Montana.”

A similar conversation has been playing out in Congress

On Tuesday, Hinkle — one of the Montana rule’s Republican supporters — acknowledged that the issue has been in the national spotlight.

“I think it’s time that this body addresses this issue now as they are addressing it nationally,” he said.

The Montana measure came right after a similar conversion arose in the nation’s Capital — but ended in a very different outcome.

In early November, Democratic Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.

Weeks later, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a measure that would ban transgender women from using facilities in the Capitol building that do not correspond with their sex at birth. Mace later followed up with legislation that would extend to all facilities on federal property.

House Speaker Mike Johnson hasn’t commented on a plan to vote on those measures, but released a clarification saying all single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings are “reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”

McBride — like many of her soon-to-be Democratic colleagues — criticized the ordeal as a distraction, but said she will comply with the rules Johnson outlined.

“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” tweeted McBride, who will take office in January. “I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For more than a decade, North Carolina has been home to a bitter back-and-forth over whether voters must show identification to cast a ballot in the swing state.

The requirement finally got its first major test in last month’s presidential election.

Overall, just a tiny fraction of people had their ballots rejected.

But critics say voter ID is still a solution in search of a problem, and they note that Black voters were more likely to have their ballots rejected than white voters.

Kelle Pressley of Charlotte was one of the voters nearly affected.

Pressley is a consistent voter, having cast a ballot 29 times since 2008, counting primaries and general elections. But when she came to vote on Election Day last month, she realized she didn’t have her ID.

“I change bags often, and I was thinking I had it on me, but I didn’t,” she said. “I still haven’t found it.”

Pressley said there was confusion at her precinct about her options.

She said poll workers urged her to go home and find her ID, instead of having her cast a provisional ballot and fill out an ID exception form, which allows voters to list a reason why they don’t have an ID. The reasons range from a voter lacking transportation to them losing their ID.

Pressley went home and called a voter protection hotline. She then came back to her precinct an hour before polls closed. She said this time poll workers allowed her to fill out the exception form and cast a provisional ballot. Her vote ultimately counted.

“Someone else would have … been like, ‘Forget about it, I’m not voting,’ ” she said. “‘Que sera sera, whatever will be will be.’ “

Only a fraction of votes rejected

Pressley was one of nearly 6,900 North Carolinians who came to vote without photo ID. Out of more than 5.7 million voters, that’s about one in every 830 voters who cast ballots.

Most of those people were able to cast a provisional ballot. County elections boards counted most of them and, in the end, just 1,670 people had their ballots rejected because they didn’t have ID. The rejection rate was one in every 3,400 voters.

But attorney Kathleen Roblez with the group Forward Justice, which has a pending lawsuit over the voter ID law, said that’s still too many people, considering in-person voter fraud has been found to be almost nonexistent.

And she said more people were probably impacted this year than show up in state data.

“So you really have no idea how many people saw all of the information about ID and said, ‘I can’t vote,’ ” Roblez said.

A long fight that’s still not over

Voter ID is required in 36 states, including the swing states of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

North Carolina’s fight over ID rules has lasted more than a decade.

Two years after Republicans gained control of the state legislature in 2011, GOP lawmakers passed a strict photo ID law.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016 overturned the law, ruling that Republican legislators targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.”

In 2018, lawmakers tried again. They placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot requiring photo ID. It was approved with 55% of the vote. It also had support from some Black lawmakers.

The legislature then passed a law to implement the amendment. The second photo ID law was more lenient than the 2013 version, allowing voters to use multiple IDs and to get a free ID from their county elections board. It also allowed people to cast provisional ballots so long as they list a reason for not having identification.

Six voters sued over the new law, along with the NAACP. In 2021, North Carolina judges struck down the law, saying it again discriminated against Black voters.

Allison Riggs, who is now on the state Supreme Court, was an attorney for the plaintiffs. She said that ruling shows “how the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color.”

But in 2023, the state Supreme Court — with a new Republican majority — said that photo ID could proceed. The requirement was in place for municipal elections that fall, and in the March 2024 primary. The November general election was photo ID’s first major test.

A small fraction of people had ballots rejected.

But there was a racial disparity. Black voters had 30% of the rejected ballots, despite being about 20% of the electorate.

“Black North Carolinians statistically lack the kind of IDs that would be approved,” Roblez said. “And they are also statistically more likely to have a hard time getting the other ID.”

Andy Jackson, with the conservative John Locke Foundation, said it’s important to note that the number of rejected ballots for each racial group was small. For Black voters, 502 people had their ballots rejected, compared with 622 white voters.

He said there will always be disparities among groups in any requirement.

“I don’t know if anyone ever expects any statistic to be exactly the same,” he said.

Changes coming?

Some North Carolina Republicans have questioned whether the state’s voter ID exception form undermines the purpose of the law.

But Jackson said he believes most Republicans want to move on.

“I don’t know how strict they want to go because I don’t know if they have an appetite for another lawsuit,” he said.

On Monday, GOP lawmakers advanced a new measure that would codify in the state constitution that photo ID is needed for voting by mail as well.

Photo ID wouldn’t have materially affected the state’s presidential race this year, which Donald Trump won by 183,000 votes.

But some contests were much closer, like a state Supreme Court race, where Riggs, a Democrat, went into a recount against her Republican opponent up by just 722 votes.