Who is Sean Duffy, NASA's new interim chief? From champion lumberjack, reality TV star and Cabinet secretary to space

NASA has a new leader, at least for now.

On Wednesday evening (July 9), President Donald Trump named Sean Duffy interim chief of the space agency. Duffy takes over from Janet Petro, who had served as acting NASA administrator since Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20.

It's unclear how long Duffy will serve in his new role, but it could be a while. Trump has yet to name a replacement for Jared Isaacman, who he originally nominated to be permanent NASA chief before rescinding that nomination on May 31.

However long he stays in the job, Duffy will be quite busy: He's also Trump's Secretary of Transportation. Here's a short primer on Duffy, whose background is far more colorful than that of most government officials.

Duffy was born on Oct. 3, 1971 in Hayward, a small city in northern Wisconsin. He's the 10th of 11 children in an Irish Catholic family, according to his biography on the U.S. Department of Transportation website. He "comes from a long line of lumberjacks, who helped build his beloved state of Wisconsin," the biography states.

Duffy himself was big into timber sports; he started log rolling at age five and speed climbing — racing vertically up 60- and 90-foot (18- and 27-meter) poles — at 13, according to an early 2000s feature in Classic Wisconsin.

"There's a huge log rolling school here in Hayward," Duffy told the publication at the time, "so a lot of the kids in the community would come down and take log rolling lessons, much the same as kids would take soccer lessons and swimming lessons in other communities."

He got very good at such contests. At the time the Classic Wisconsin article was published, Duffy (then 30 years old), held two world speed-climbing titles.

Duffy stayed in the upper Midwest U.S. for college, graduating from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota with a B.A. in marketing in 1994.

Three years later, the wider world got its first look at Duffy. He starred in "The Real World: Boston," the sixth season of the MTV reality show that put a disparate group of young people together in a house for a few months and chronicled their lives and interactions. (The show is still going, though its MTV days ended in 2017.)

Duffy was one of seven people in the Boston house. He remained in the "Real World" universe for a spell after that stint ended, participating in the spinoff shows "Road Rules: All Stars" and "Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons."

On "Road Rules: All Stars," he met Rachel Campos, an alum of "The Real World: San Francisco," which aired in 1994. The two got married in 1999.

"Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple," Duffy's Department of Transportation bio reads. "They have been married for 25 years and have nine children together."

The same year he got married, Duffy graduated from the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. He began his law career in private practice but in 2002 was appointed district attorney of Wisconsin's Ashland County.

Duffy, a Republican, held that post until 2010, when he was elected to represent Wisconsin's District 7 in the U.S. House of Representatives. He won reelection multiple times and made an imprint on the body, "serving on the House Financial Services Committee and actively leading on local transportation issues via his co-chairmanship of the Great Lakes Task Force," according to his Department of Transportation bio.

Duffy stood behind many of Trump's initiatives and priorities during the president's first term. In 2017, for example, he supported the executive order temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. A year later, he introduced a bill designed to give Trump more tariff-imposing power.

Duffy left Congress in September 2019 to spend more time with his family as he and his wife prepared to welcome a baby daughter who had been diagnosed with a heart condition.

He then worked as a CNN political commentator and as a lobbyist with the firm BGR Group. In January 2023, he began co-hosting "The Bottom Line with Dagen and Duffy," a show on the Fox Business channel. But it wouldn't be long before he returned to politics.

In November 2024, Trump announced that he had tapped Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation during his second presidential term. Duffy will continue to hold this high-profile job while steering NASA as interim chief.

Duffy may lack a substantive science, engineering and aerospace background, but he seems to have plenty of enthusiasm. "Honored to accept this mission. Time to take over space. Let's launch," he said via X on Wednesday evening.

It's too soon to say what Duffy's appointment will mean for NASA. The agency is beleaguered at the moment, facing large cuts to its coffers, its workforce and its science portfolio: Trump's 2026 budget, if enacted, would slash the agency's overall funding by 24% and its science budget by nearly half, resulting in the cancellation of dozens of missions.

Having Duffy in the top spot may give NASA something of a boost, in the form of a direct line to the president via one of his trusted allies, Ars Technica's Eric Berger noted. But, Berger added, "it is also possible that he takes his mandate to slash NASA's budget and workforce seriously, and in doing so would be vastly more effective than Petro."