According to the last person who held the job, it’s been too long already.

“The agency’s been doing really well, considering,” Charles Bolden said in a phone interview Thursday night. “But they need an administrator.”

Since Bolden stepped down from the top post last January, the position has been held by Robert Lightfoot, the former director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama. Previous acting administrators have served longer, but they took on the job during an existing administration, when their bosses resigned early. Bolden said Lightfoot is “more than capable” of serving in the role, but the agency needs a complete roster of leadership roles. The number-two job at NASA, deputy administrator, remains unfilled. Lightfoot is “doing double duty,” Bolden said. “A lot of senior staff are doing double duty.”

The lack of a permanent leader has left NASA in a state of limbo. It’s difficult for interim leaders to advocate for the agency on long-term matters, including the budget, simply because they don’t expect to stick around for that long. “Fundamentally, an acting administrator is not empowered to make big changes at NASA,” said Casey Dreier, the director of space policy at the Planetary Society in California. “He’s there just to keep the ship running steady.”

The Trump White House announced its nomination for NASA chief in September. The administration picked Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma and former Navy combat pilot. Bridenstine studied business and economics and served as the executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum before he was elected to Congress in 2012. Unlike his colleagues from states like Florida, Alabama, or Maryland, which host major NASA facilities, Bridenstine has few NASA stakes to defend in his home state, but the congressman has maintained a strong interest in space policy. In 2016, he introduced legislation for reforms in several areas of the nation’s space agenda that he did not expect to pass, but hoped would spur discussions in Congress.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a confirmation hearing for Bridenstine in November that quickly turned contentious.

Democrats, particularly Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, criticized Bridenstine over his lack of a science or space background. (Bolden was a former astronaut.) They pressed him about comments he’d made about the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage, which he said was a “disappointment,” and former president Barack Obama’s executive order instructing public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice, which he described as “lawless federal bullying.”

Democrats also grilled Bridenstine on his views on climate change. The congressman has said he believes humans have contributed to the shifting climate, but stopped short of saying they were the primary cause. Republicans, meanwhile, praised and defended Bridenstine from the Democrats’ line of questioning, which Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado at one point described as “a little bit disgusting.”