A quick refresher: there was originally $42.5 billion in broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).
Money given to Bezos and Musk is money not spent on better, faster, local fiber optics (especially popular community owned networks). A serious broadband policy would ensure that open access fiber is the priority, followed by wireless, with satellite filling the gaps. Satellite was never intended to be the primary delivery mechanism for broadband, because of obvious congestion and capacity constraints.
The Trump NTIA is doing all of this under the pretense that giving taxpayer money to billionaires (for satellite service they already planned to deploy) instead of spending it on high quality fiber is “saving taxpayers money.” That’s generally resulted in widespread delays for this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program, despite Republicans spending much of last election season complaining this program was taking too long.
The Trump NTIA hijacking of the program has also created a $21 billion pool of “non deployment funds” made up of the fake savings Republicans claim they created by screwing up the program. There’s a looming fight emerging over what happens to that money. Congress and the infrastructure law specifically states this money is supposed to be dedicated to expanding broadband access.
States would obviously like to use this money either for broadband, or for local infrastructure. But you get the sense that this giant wad of cash is very tempting for the Trump administration to just hijack and use as an unaccountable slush fund, doled out to its most loyal red state allies (or just kept by the “Treasury”).
After delays and excuses extended in to last summer, the Trump NTIA was supposed to provide guidance for states on how this money could be used earlier this month, but has been a no show:
“Under pressure from senators at an appropriations hearing, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last month sought to calm fears when he said that so-called “non-deployment” funds under the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program would not be rescinded.
But with no guidance so far from the department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which was expected but delayed this week, lawmakers and others are pushing to have their voice heard on exactly how states will be able to use the $21 billion pot of money.”
It’s not clear if states can trust the word of Lutnick (who’s been a little distracted by Epstein allegations). The Trump administration has threatened (quite illegally) to withhold BEAD funding entirely from states that attempt to stand up to telecom monopolies or insist that taxpayer-funded broadband is affordable. There were also several initiatives to withhold BEAD funds if states tried to regulate AI.
Unsurprisingly, many states are afraid to be honest about what a cock up this whole hijacking has been in the press for fear of losing billions in potential (and already technically awarded) funding.
There’s a real potential here that taxpayer money that was originally earmarked for future-proof, ultra-fast fiber network is going to be repurposed into a general free for all slush fund that gets redirected to whoever praises the Trump administration the most. And I wouldn’t be surprised that this ultimately results in state lawsuits against the federal government for redirecting funds.
“I think the state officials who think they’re going to be made whole, need to reread the Merchant of Venice, because [NTIA boss Arielle] Roth is coming for her pound of flesh,” Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University, told me in an email. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s operationalized in a way to directly target or disadvantage blue states — whether in what it does, or what’s tied to the acceptance of the funding.”
One last side note: last election season the “abundance” folks like Ezra Klein spent ample time parroting GOP criticism of the admitted delays and problems with this BEAD program (ignoring why the program took so long, as well as other examples of similar broadband grant programs from the same year doing well) as an example of a Democratic bureaucratic dysfunction.
But I’ve noticed that since Trump hijacked the program, introduced massive delays, redirected billions to billionaires, and even tried to run off with half the funding, the subject hasn’t been revisited by Klein since. Quite generally (since infrastructure just doesn’t get those clicks) the press coverage of this whole mess has ranged from nonexistent to positively tepid.
Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology.
On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.
As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.
“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.
“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.
“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.
“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.
ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.
Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.
The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.
The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.
During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.
“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.
The aggressive moves have sent shock waves through the nuclear energy world. Many longtime promoters of the industry say they worry recklessness from the Trump administration could discredit responsible nuclear energy initiatives.
“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” warned Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair during the Obama administration. “The safety culture is under threat.”
A ProPublica analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management shows a rush to the exits: Over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. The losses are particularly pronounced in the teams that handle reactor and nuclear materials safety and among veteran staffers with 10 or more years of experience. Meanwhile, hiring of new staff has proceeded at a snail’s pace, with nearly 60 new arrivals in the first year of the Trump administration compared with nearly 350 in the last year of the Biden administration.
Some nuclear power supporters say the administration is providing a needed level of urgency given the energy demands of AI. They also contend the sweeping changes underway aren’t as dangerous or dire as some experts suggest.
“I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the investment and strategy consultancy Veriten. “It’s a great time to get unfrozen and aim to work quickly.”
The White House referred most of ProPublica’s questions to the Department of Energy, where spokesperson Olivia Tinari said the agency is committed to helping build more safe, high-quality nuclear energy facilities.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is entering a new era that will provide reliable, abundant power for generations to come,” she wrote. The DOE is “committed to the highest standards of safety for American workers and communities.”
Cohen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NRC declined to comment.
Blindsided by DOGE
The U.S. has not had a serious nuclear incident since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, a track record many experts attribute to a rigorous regulatory environment and an intense safety culture.
Major nuclear incidents around the world have only strengthened the resolve of past regulators to stay independent from industry and from political winds. A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami.
“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who was assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Biden administration.
The U.S. has barely built any nuclear power plants in recent decades. Only three new reactors have been completed in the last 25 years, and since 1990 the U.S has barely added any net new nuclear electricity to its grid. Though about 20% of U.S. energy is supplied by nuclear power plants, the fleet is aging. Some experts blame the slow build-out on the challenging economics of financing a multibillion-dollar project and the uncertainty of accessing and disposing of nuclear fuels.
But an increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.
Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”
Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.
The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.
As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president’s team explained the move by saying, “All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”
In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote: “All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”
In August, the NRC’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.
That summer, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin’ in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.
Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign. “They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn’t seem to care that much about the rules — they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.
At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.
NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator’s role, said a former official familiar with the exchange. “Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator — the watchdog — is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” the official said. “Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.
Valar counts Trump’s Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids.
It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC’s authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement — which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.
Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.
“Going So Fast”
The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure — both political and economic — to make it easier to build nuclear power in the U.S. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.
Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy like wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it “does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.
Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC’s byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors — massive facilities that can power entire cities — and not the increasingly in vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.
Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.
The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.
“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the U.S. because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.
The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.
“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”
Lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency’s independence.
Nicholas Gallagher — a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration — has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.
He’s working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting “Marxists, socialists and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”
NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.
The White House maintains, however, that “zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.
The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.
Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”
Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.
At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board — an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing — NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing “limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.
Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired. “It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.
The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water. “If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.
Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.
Any final changes will be approved by the NRC’s five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump — including over revisions to safety rules.
Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56% cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.
Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.
“You have to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.
Greenwald’s group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency’s fundamental independence has been undermined. “We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.
“Nuke Bros” in Silicon Valley
One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.
“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid … and then there are the ‘nuke bros’” in Silicon Valley.
Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.
Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump’s second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.
A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text — and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.
Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo — has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority: “We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.
The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors “go critical” — a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant — by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.
According to people familiar with the conversations, at least one nuclear energy startup CEO personally recruited potential members of the DOGE nuclear team, though it’s not clear if Cohen was brought aboard this way. Cohen has told colleagues and industry contacts that he reports to Emily Underwood, one of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s top aides for economic policy. He is perceived inside government as a key avatar of the White House’s nuclear agenda.
In its email to ProPublica, the White House said, “Seth Cohen is a Department of Energy employee and does not report to Emily Underwood or Stephen Miller in any capacity.”
The DOE spokesperson added, “Seth’s role at the Department of Energy is to support the Trump administration’s mission to unleash American Energy Dominance.”
Cohen has been pushing to raise the legal limit of radiation that nuclear energy companies are allowed to emit from their facilities. One nuclear industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many firms are fixating on changing these radiation rules: Their business model requires moving nuclear reactors around the country, often near workers or the general public.
Building thick, expensive shielding walls can be prohibitively expensive, they said.
Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor has called limits on exposure to radiation a top barrier to industry growth. A recent DOE memo seen by ProPublica cites cost savings on shielding for Valar’s reactor to justify changing those limits. “Shielding-related cost reductions,” the memo said, “could range from $1-2 million per reactor.” The debate over the precise rule change is ongoing.
The DOE has been considering a fivefold increase to the limit for public exposure to radiation, which will allow some nuclear reactor companies to cut costs on these expensive safety shields, internal DOE documents seen by ProPublica show.
A presentation prepared by DOE staffers in their Idaho offices that has circulated inside the department makes the “business case” for changing the radiation dose rules: It could cut the cost of some new reactors by as much as 5%. These more relaxed standards are likely to be adopted by the NRC and apply to reactors nationwide, documents show.
In February, Wright accompanied Valar’s executive team on a first-of-its-kind flight, as a U.S. military plane was conscripted to fly the company’s reactor from Los Angeles to Utah. Valar does not yet have a working nuclear reactor, and a number of industry sources told ProPublica they viewed the airlift as a PR exercise. Internal government memos justified the airlift by designating it as “critical” to the U.S. “national security interests.”
Cohen posted smiling pictures of himself from the cargo bay of the military plane.
Cohen told an audience at the American Nuclear Society that the rapid build-out was essential to powering Silicon Valley’s AI data centers. He framed the policy in existential terms: “I can’t emphasize this strongly enough that losing the AI war is an outcome akin to the Nazis developing the bomb before the United States.”
As it deliberated rule changes, the DOE has cut out its internal team of health experts who work on radiation safety at the Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, said sources familiar with the decision. The advice of outside experts on radiation protection has been largely cast aside.
The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science … with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”
The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA” — the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard — which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.
It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.
Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.
Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”
John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”
The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the U.S. has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the U.S. out of step with international standards.
For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.
In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?”
He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events — disasters that have roughly a 1% chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.
“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.
On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take down content — how officials called and screamed and cursed — and how, going forward, he was a changed man. A champion of free expression, done forever with government demands to remove content. And a whole bunch of people (especially MAGA folks) cheered all this on. Zuckerberg was a protector of free speech against government suppression!
Twenty-four days later, he texted Elon Musk — a senior government official at the time — to volunteer to remove content the government wouldn’t like. Unprompted.
As I wrote at the time, the whole Rogan interview was an exercise in misdirection. The “pressure” Zuck kept describing was the kind of thing the Supreme Court explicitly found, in the Murthy case, was standard-issue government communication — the kind of thing Justice Kagan said happens “literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.” The Court called the lower court’s findings of “censorship” clearly erroneous. And Zuck himself kept admitting, over and over, that Meta’s response to the Biden administration was to tell them no. He said so explicitly:
And basically it just got to this point where we were like, no we’re not going to. We’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous…
In other words, the Biden administration asked, Meta said “nah,” and that was that. The Supreme Court agreed this fell well short of coercion. Indeed, the only documented instance of the Biden administration making an actual specific takedown request to a social media platform was to flag an account impersonating one of Biden’s grandchildren. That was it. That was the “massive government censorship operation.”
But Zuck milked it beautifully on the podcast, and Rogan ate it up. The narrative was established: Zuckerberg, defender of free expression, standing tall against the censorious government, vowing to never again let officials dictate what stays up and what comes down on his platforms.
That was January 10th.
On February 3rd, Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk:
Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.
So the man who spent three hours performing righteous indignation about government censorship proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”
A guy who spent three hours on the biggest podcast in the world performing righteous indignation about government censorship pressure — then, weeks later, volunteered exactly that kind of service, unprompted, to the same government. Just with a different party in power.
The Biden administration’s alleged “coercion” amounted to strongly worded emails that Meta freely ignored, and its only documented specific takedown request was for an account literally pretending to be the president’s grandchild. Zuckerberg’s response to that: three hours on the world’s biggest podcast denouncing government censorship. His response to Musk’s DOGE operation: a proactive late-night text offering to suppress information identifying the federal employees doing the dismantling.
And Zuck’s framing of “doxxing” is doing a lot of work here. The DOGE staffers whose identities were being shared on social media were federal employees exercising enormous government power — canceling grants, accessing sensitive government databases, making decisions that affected millions of Americans. The administration went to great lengths to hide who these people were, precisely because what they were doing was controversial and, in many cases, potentially illegal. Identifying who is wielding government power on your behalf has a name, and that name is accountability, not “doxxing.”
Notably, the Zuckerberg text came the day after Wired started naming DOGE bros. Which is reporting. Not doxxing. Doxxing is revealing private info, such as an address. A federal employee’s name is not private info. It’s just journalism.
Also notice how Zuckerberg bundles “doxxing or threatening” — conflating two very different things. Removing credible threats of violence is something every platform already does; it’s in every terms of service. But by packaging the identification of public servants alongside actual threats, Zuck makes the whole thing sound like a routine trust-and-safety operation rather than what it actually was: volunteering to help the government hide its own employees from public scrutiny.
Compare the two scenarios directly. The Biden administration flagged a fake account impersonating a minor family member of the president — a clear-cut case of impersonation that every platform’s rules already cover. In other cases, they simply asked Facebook to explain its policies for dealing with potential health misinformation in the middle of a pandemic. Zuckerberg’s response, per his Rogan narrative, was to tell them to pound sand, and then go on a podcast to brag about it. Meanwhile, when it came to Musk and DOGE, it looks like Zuck didn’t wait to be asked. He texted Elon Musk at 10 PM on a Monday night to let him know the teams were already mobilized. He closed with “let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help,” which is really more “eager intern” energy than “principled defender of free expression” energy.
It’s also worth noting the broader context of the relationship here. These two were, at least publicly, supposed to be rivals. Remember the whole cage match fiasco? The very public trash-talking? And yet here’s Zuck texting Musk late at night, opening with flattery (“Looks like DOGE is making progress”), offering content suppression as a gift, and then — in literally the next breath in the text exchange — Musk pivots to asking Zuck if he wants to join a bid to buy OpenAI’s intellectual property.
“Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?” Musk asked. Zuck suggested they discuss it live. Just a couple of billionaires doing billionaire things at 10:30 PM after one of them volunteered censorship services to the other’s government operation.
We only know about any of this, by the way, because of Musk’s quixotic lawsuit against OpenAI. These texts were designated as a trial exhibit by OpenAI’s lawyers. Musk’s team is now trying to get them excluded from evidence. The motion seeking to suppress this evidence opens with one of the more entertaining paragraphs you’ll find in a legal filing:
President Trump. Burning Man. Rhino ketamine. These are all inflammatory and highly irrelevant topics that Defendants are trying to improperly make the subject of this litigation. Throughout fact discovery, Defendants have gratuitously probed these topics, and their trial evidence disclosures make clear that they intend to use the same scandalizing tactics at trial. Defendants should not be allowed to exploit Musk’s political involvement, social or recreational choices, or gratuitous details of his personal life at trial. As detailed below, Musk is the subject of daily, often-fabricated media scrutiny.
The filing goes on to argue that the Zuckerberg text exchange has “nothing to do with Musk’s claims” and amounts to an attempt to “stoke negative sentiments toward Musk because of his association with Zuckerberg.” Which is a fun way to describe a text message in which a tech CEO volunteers content moderation favors to a government official. Musk’s lawyers aren’t wrong that it’s embarrassing — just not for the reasons they think.
The hypocrisy, though, is almost beside the point. The entire Rogan performance was designed to establish a narrative: that the Biden administration engaged in some kind of unprecedented censorship campaign, and that Zuckerberg was bravely standing up to it. That narrative was then used to justify Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programs and loosen its content policies — framed as a return to “free expression” principles.
But the Zuck-Musk texts show what those “free expression” principles actually look like in practice. Zuck is more than happy to suppress speech when he supports the person in the White House. It’s only when he doesn’t like the person in the White House that he gets to pretend he’s a free speech warrior.
This has nothing to do with free expression. It’s about power. Who has it, who Zuckerberg thinks he needs to stay on the right side of, and who he thinks he can safely perform outrage against. The Biden administration was on its way out the door when Zuck did the Rogan interview, making them a perfectly safe target for his “never again” act. Musk was ascendant, running a government operation backed by a president who had directly threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison.
So the principled free speech stance lasted less than a month before Zuck was back to volunteering content suppression — this time without even being asked, for the people who actually had the power to hurt him. And that’s just the text message that surfaced in an unrelated lawsuit. The rest of the ledger isn’t public.
Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit — with prejudice — confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don’t want their brands plastered next to extremist content aren’t engaged in an illegal conspiracy. They’re just making basic (probably pretty smart) business decisions.
When X Corp filed this case back in August of 2024, we walked through in great detail why the legal theory was fundamentally broken. Not broken in a “they pleaded it badly” kind of way, but broken in a “this theory does not describe an antitrust violation no matter how many drugs you’re taking or how convinced you are that the world owes you advertising dollars” kind of way. Judge Jane Boyle of the Northern District of Texas has now agreed, and the key section of her ruling is worth reading in full, because it says what we said at the outset: X has not suffered antitrust injury.
The court laid out the standard, quoting the Fifth Circuit, channeling the Supreme Court, on what counts as an antitrust injury:
The Supreme Court has distilled antitrust injury as being “injury of the type the antitrust laws were intended to prevent and that flows from that which makes defendants’ acts unlawful.” … “The antitrust laws … were enacted for ‘the protection of competition not competitors.'” … “Typical” antitrust injury thus “include[s] increased prices and decreased output.” … “This circuit has narrowly interpreted the meaning of antitrust injury, excluding from it the threat of decreased competition.” … “Loss from competition itself—that is, loss in the form of customers[] choosing the competitor’s goods and services over the plaintiff’s—does not constitute an antitrust injury.” … In short, the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.
Antitrust law protects competition, not competitors. X’s entire argument boiled down to: “advertisers chose to spend their money somewhere other than our platform, and that hurt us.” But that’s just… the market. That’s how markets work. Customers choosing not to buy from you because they don’t like what you’re selling has never been an antitrust violation, and the court made short work of explaining why.
Amusingly, the GOP — whose campaigns Musk has bankrolled extensively — spent decades pushing for exactly this narrow definition of antitrust injury, precisely to make cases like this harder to bring. Perhaps one of those politicians could have mentioned that before Elon filed.
But this case was never actually about winning an antitrust case. It was a warning shot at advertisers: give Elon your money or we’ll drag you through an expensive court process. A shakedown dressed up in legal filings. Indeed, after the lawsuit was filed, it was reported that part of X’s “sales” process was to threaten companies that they’d be added to the lawsuit if they didn’t advertise on the platform.
The court examined X’s theory from two different angles, and it failed both times. First, if the conspiracy was supposed to benefit competing social media platforms (like Pinterest, one of the defendants), X hadn’t alleged that any competitor was actually behind the boycott or pressuring advertisers to exclude X so the competitor could corner the market:
X has not alleged that the advertisers chose to do business with Pinterest—or any other social media company—as part of an agreement not to do business with X. Unlike the large hospital in Doctor’s Hospital, Pinterest is not alleged to be X’s competitor that wanted to exclude X from the market so that it could charge higher prices. In turn, unlike the network in Doctor’s Hospital, the advertisers did not decide to boycott X at Pinterest’s—or any other X competitor’s—behest to secure the competitor’s business. Instead, X alleges a conspiracy driven by advertisers not to further X-competitor social media companies’ interests but to pursue their own collective interests as to where they place their advertisements.
Second, if the conspiracy was supposed to eliminate competition at the advertiser level, the court found that GARM wasn’t acting as some kind of gatekeeper blocking X from accessing customers. It was just… advertisers deciding for themselves:
GARM is not an economic intermediary like the retailers in Eastern States. GARM did not buy advertising space from X to sell to advertisers nor did it, in such an arrangement, tell X not to sell directly to GARM’s customers. Rather, GARM was organized by advertisers and reflected their “avowed commitment to furthering [their] economic interests . . . as a group.” … Thus, if GARM is the obstacle to X reaching its advertiser-customers directly, then it is the equivalent of the advertiser-customers themselves deciding not to deal.
That’s the ballgame. Advertisers collectively deciding they don’t want to spend money on your platform — especially after you’ve told them to go fuck themselves and your platform has become a haven for content that damages their brands — just doesn’t state an antitrust claim. Imagine being so entitled that when the marketplace rejects your offering, you insist that it must be an antitrust attack on your rights to their money?
The court was so confident in this conclusion that it dismissed the case with prejudice and denied X the opportunity to replead, noting that the 165-paragraph complaint was already plenty detailed:
The 165-paragraph Second Amended Complaint contains no dearth of detail: if facts existed that GARM operated at an X competitor’s behest to put X out of business or that GARM advertisers sought to unfairly exclude competing advertisers from doing business, X would have pleaded those facts. The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice.
When a court tells you the nature of your theory doesn’t work, that’s about as definitive a loss as you can get.
As we noted when the case was filed, the evidence X submitted in its own complaint actually undermined the case. One of X’s own exhibits showed GARM’s lead, Rob Rakowitz, explicitly telling an advertiser that GARM doesn’t make recommendations and that advertising decisions are “completely within the sphere of each member and subject to their own discretion.” Another email showed Rakowitz telling an advertiser asking about Twitter that “you may want to connect with Twitter directly to understand their progress on brand safety and make your own decisions.” This is the supposedly nefarious conspiracy that X spent years and untold legal fees litigating.
Separately, I have to mention the blatant forum shopping: X filed this case in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas, which was widely understood as a transparent attempt to land in front of Judge Reed O’Connor, known for partisan rulings and already presiding over Elon’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters. That didn’t work out — O’Connor recused himself, not because of his ownership of Tesla stock, but rather his ownership of some advertising firms who were defendants. The case got reassigned to Judge Boyle, and X still lost. In an ironic twist, X then tried to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York, only to have the court deny that motion because X couldn’t even prove they did business in that specific district. So X handpicked a forum, lost its judge, and then couldn’t escape to a different one. Great lawyering.
But the legal dismissal, satisfying as it is, doesn’t capture the most important part of what actually happened here. Because while the court correctly found that X suffered no antitrust injury, GARM itself suffered a very real injury: it was killed.
GARM shut down within days of the lawsuit being filed, following Rep. Jim Jordan’s misleading congressional investigation that painted the organization as some kind of anti-conservative censorship machine. Jordan’s pressure campaign, combined with the threat of expensive litigation from the world’s richest man, made it untenable for GARM to continue operating. The organization that existed to help advertisers make informed decisions about brand safety — a fundamentally expressive activity, protected by the First Amendment — was destroyed through government jawboning and litigation threats.
There was only one attack on free speech involved here and it came from Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, not GARM or its advertiser members.
X filed this lawsuit wrapped in the language of free speech. Former X CEO Linda Yaccarino literally wore a necklace that said “free speech” while announcing the case, claiming that advertisers not giving X money was somehow an attack on users’ ability to express themselves. The actual speech suppression ran the other direction entirely. A private organization exercising its speech rights to help its members make informed business decisions was bullied out of existence through a combination of congressional intimidation and frivolous litigation.
Jordan celebrated GARM’s dissolution as a victory for free speech — par for the course for the censorial MAGA GOP. A congressman used the weight of his office to pressure a private organization into shutting down, and called that free speech. Meanwhile, the lawsuit that was part of that same ecosystem of intimidation has now been found to have no legal merit whatsoever.
This is what actual jawboning looks like in practice. The lawsuit didn’t need to succeed to accomplish its goal. GARM is gone. The organization that facilitated conversations among advertisers about how to protect their brands has been silenced. The chilling effect on any future organization that might want to do something similar is obvious and intentional. Any industry group that tries to coordinate around brand safety now knows that it might face a billionaire-funded lawsuit and a congressional investigation for its trouble.
The court’s ruling is a vindication of basic antitrust law. But the more important point is about what the actual free speech dynamics were in this whole saga.
X can appeal, of course, and given that this falls within the Fifth Circuit, stranger things have happened. But the fundamental problem remains what it’s always been: the theory that advertisers owe you their business because you exist, and that organizing around brand safety is a criminal conspiracy, has never been a viable legal argument. The court said so plainly. Dismissed with prejudice. Nothing to fix, because the whole premise was broken from the start.
Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That’s a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending by bringing the vaunted “efficiency” of the tech world to the government, a lot of people — not just MAGA diehards, but regular people who’d spent time cursing at a federal website built in 2003 or waiting on hold with the DMV — thought: sure, maybe give it a shot. A decade of fawning tech press coverage about Elon Musk will do that to your priors.
We now have the receipts on how that went. And they’re absolutely damning.
Let’s start with the most basic question: did DOGE save the government money? Because that was, you know, apparently the whole point (or so we were told).
The answer, as the Times bluntly puts it:
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
Spending went up. Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts during the campaign, started walking that back almost immediately after the election, and the actual result was that the government spent more money. The entire exercise was supposed to pay for itself many times over. Instead, the taxpayer funded an $81 million operation that produced negative returns.
But DOGE had that website — the “Wall of Receipts” — proudly tallying up all those billions in savings, right? About that. The Times went through the 40 largest items on DOGE’s claimed savings list:
In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.
Two fake line items on a spreadsheet claimed more “savings” than 25,000 other entries combined. Of the 40 biggest claims, 28 were wrong. The 13 biggest were all wrong. The very first day the “Wall of Receipts” went live, its largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was off by a factor of 1,000 — the contract was actually worth $8 million, as many folks reported at the time. That’s the kind of error that would get you fired from an introductory accounting course, and these were the people supposedly bringing precision and transparency to the federal government.
The accounting trick DOGE relied on most heavily is worth understanding, because it reveals whether this was mere incompetence or something more deliberate. The Times explains that in many cases, DOGE simply lowered the “ceiling value” of contracts — the theoretical maximum the government could spend, not what it was actually spending — and then claimed the full difference as “savings.” A defense contractor CEO explained this perfectly to stock analysts:
This summer, CACI’s chief executive, John Mengucci, told stock analysts that the change was meaningless.
“It doesn’t change a thing for this company,” he said. His company had always expected to be paid about $2 billion over the contract’s life span. And even if the contract ever did reach the ceiling, he said, the Pentagon could just raise it again.
“There’s no reduction of revenue,” Mr. Mengucci said.
Or to put it in even more understandable terms:
“Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money?” said Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies federal spending. “No, it does not.”
The core of DOGE’s operations was to manufacture pretend statistics so that Musk and friends could claim savings that weren’t real. It was how DOGE manufactured the appearance of progress while delivering essentially nothing. After DOGE initially claimed $55 billion in savings, the website’s own documentation only supported $16.5 billion. Media analysis then showed half of that was a single data entry error (that $8 billion instead of $8 million). A Politico analysis found DOGE had cut only $1.4 billion in actual spending — and even that money couldn’t reduce the deficit because it would be returned to agencies that were legally obligated to spend it. More than one-third of DOGE’s contract cancellations yielded no monetary savings at all.
The Garcia report traces a trajectory that any honest observer should find embarrassing:
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk claimed he could reduce the federal deficit by eliminating “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, promising the destruction of the American social safety net. He began walking back these goals after President Trump’s election victory. In early 2025, Mr. Musk appeared on a variety of conservative-leaning podcasts and media outlets baselessly claiming that fake or stolen Social Security numbers led to more than $500 billion in fraud. Media analysis classified Mr. Musk’s claims about waste and fraud in the federal government as lacking evidence or misleading, saying that he misconstrued Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports or lacked basic understanding of the contracts in question.
So: $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $55 billion claimed, then $16.5 billion documented, then $1.4 billion confirmed, then spending went up anyway. That’s quite a trajectory for something that was sold as bringing Silicon Valley precision and efficiency to government.
Okay, fine — DOGE didn’t save much money. But did it at least make the government run better? Did it cut red tape, speed things up, make services less awful?
No. It did the opposite. And this is the part that should really bother anyone who genuinely wanted government reform.
The Garcia report documents in excruciating detail how DOGE’s “efficiency” measures actually added bureaucratic layers:
In one example, a State Department employee described a new requirement for a 250-word essay, extra forms, and days of work and approvals needed to hire a vendor for an embassy event, which previously would have taken a single day. In another, a NASA employee was required to write several detailed paragraphs justifying a purchase of fastening bolts. FDA employees have stated that DOGE requirements have caused significant delays in routine food monitoring tests for items like exposure to heavy metals because spending for every step—from purchasing lab supplies to paying to ship samples between labs—now requires separate department-level approval.
Much efficient. Very savings.
As one federal employee stated:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work, which I fear is the point.”
Meanwhile, the services Americans actually rely on got measurably worse:
At the Social Security Administration (SSA), wait times for a callback ballooned to as high as two and a half hours for assistance between January and March 2025. Americans attempting to access the SSA website for assistance frequently found the webpage down or unresponsive as DOGE recklessly implemented changes while cutting information technology (IT) staff. SSA eventually discarded several of the supposed fraud checks implemented by DOGE because they significantly delayed claim processing without meaningfully combatting fraud. Career employees reportedly knew that DOGE’s anti-fraud measures would make little difference but were intimidated into silence for fear of losing their jobs. DOGE also implemented a new requirement for Social Security applicants to verify their identity in person instead of over the phone if they aren’t able to do so online, while at the same time closing regional and local offices and reducing the workforce at those offices that remained. More than six million seniors have to drive nearly 50 miles round trip to reach their nearest Social Security office, more than twice the average distance an elderly person expects to drive in a day.
This was a heist dressed up as a reform — and the damage to everyday Americans wasn’t a bug.
Layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to delays in clinical trials and getting new drugs to sick patients. Remaining FDA workers reported struggling to meet statutorily mandated schedules for approving both tobacco products and medical products after the Trump Administration announced 3,500 job cuts across the agency. At one point, FDA drug center leadership resorted to asking drug review staff to volunteer to work on contracting and acquisition tasks because the layoffs had eliminated the entire contracting office.
The Times talked to people on the receiving end of the small-dollar cuts that were DOGE’s actual handiwork. An organization providing counseling and rehabilitation services to torture survivors had to close its centers and stop paying 75% of its staff. A program that sent museum staff into low-income Baltimore schools to teach parents about child development was terminated by form letter because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” Research projects were killed at the stage where data had been collected but results hadn’t been published, rendering the government’s entire prior investment wasted. And the impact on American people was real.
Mr. Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.
“We know for sure that survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.
Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.
“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.
This is how DOGE managed to simultaneously save almost nothing and cause enormous disruption: the big-dollar claims were fake, and the real cuts targeted things that were individually small but collectively devastating to the people who depended on them.
And then there’s the corruption angle, which is where this moves from incompetence into something much uglier.
DOGE staff were embedded at nearly every executive branch agency, and many of them were associates or employees of Musk’s own companies. The conflicts of interest were staggering and barely concealed. The Garcia report details how DOGE staff were involved in firing FDA investigators responsible for oversight of Musk’s biotech company Neuralink. DOGE took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which just happened to be the agency that would directly oversee a mobile payments function Musk wanted to add to X. The DOGE staffer who oversaw firings at the CFPB owned approximately $365,000 in shares of companies regulated by the Bureau. Executive branch employees are generally prohibited from working on matters in which they hold a personal stake, but there’s no indication this person took any such precautions.
Elon Musk and DOGE’s active involvement in knee-capping agencies with which he has a direct conflict makes clear that Musk, DOGE, and the broader Trump Administration are focused on weakening accountability for the American people while advancing their own interests.
DOGE staff at the IRS initiated mass firing of skilled specialists responsible for auditing the complex tax filings of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office has found that reductions in funding for IRS tax enforcement reduce federal revenues. So DOGE’s “efficiency” move at the IRS will likely cost the government more in uncollected taxes than it could ever have saved.
The same pattern held at the CFPB, which since 2011 had received $7.3 billion in funding but returned over $21 billion to consumers through enforcement actions — a three-fold return on investment. DOGE gutted it anyway. The IRS Direct File program — a free electronic tax filing service that 86% of users said increased their trust in the IRS and was projected to save taxpayers $11 billion once fully operational — was killed after lobbying by for-profit tax preparation companies.
And perhaps most alarming were the data security violations that I’ve written about multiple times. A whistleblower from SSA reported that DOGE operatives had accessed a database containing “the entire country’s Social Security information,” copied it to a high-risk external system, and violated a court order barring them from continued access. The DOJ later had to file “corrections” to prior testimony from senior SSA staff, admitting that DOGE employees had in fact accessed SSA’s most sensitive data and covertly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with a political advocacy group that sought to overturn election results. And here’s one I had missed:
DOGE’s forced access to Treasury data was particularly noteworthy as a Treasury threat intelligence analysis recommended that DOGE staff “be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ may have posed the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
At the NLRB, a whistleblower reported that DOGE operatives sent enormous amounts of sensitive case information outside the government to unknown recipients — information that companies like Musk’s SpaceX could use to “get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data.” OPM’s own Inspector General found that DOGE employees flouted cybersecurity and privacy laws, and that Trump appointees at OPM overrode career civil servants’ warnings about security to force implementation of DOGE’s systems, which may have resulted in a massive national security threat:
Experts have shown evidence raising concerns of potential Russian and Chinese access to OPM servers shortly after DOGE created the government-wide email infrastructure. Separately, information received by Committee Democratic staff indicated that DOGE employees lowered all firewall protections at OPM to enable the exfiltration of data for use outside of a government environment.
Yikes.
And while they were gutting agencies that protect Americans, they also gutted the agencies actually responsible for catching waste, fraud, and abuse. Offices of Inspectors General — the very watchdogs whose mission aligns with what DOGE claimed to be doing — were starved of resources. One OIG lost 20% of its staff and was operating with “the fewest number of auditors in decades.” The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of politicians accused of corruption, was purged of all but a fraction of its former employees.
The Garcia report’s conclusion is perhaps the most honest assessment of the whole debacle:
Many analyses have referred to the DOGE disaster as a failure, and DOGE did indeed fail at its stated mission of meaningfully reducing spending and increasing government efficiency. But in the Trump Administration’s vindictive, ideologically motivated, and pointless quest to break the federal government, drive out talented and committed public servants, and make flashy promises of cutting fraud while enriching themselves and their wealthy donors, DOGE was a resounding success.
Now, the Garcia report is a Democratic minority report, and the most committed DOGE defenders will dismiss it on those grounds alone. But the most devastating evidence comes from DOGE’s own website — which kept quietly deleting incorrect entries — from the Times’ independent analysis, from a defense contractor’s CEO telling his shareholders the “savings” were meaningless, from the GAO finding multiple violations of the Impoundment Control Act, from OPM’s own Inspector General, and from the DOJ having to file corrections to its own court filings.
You don’t need to trust a single Democratic politician to see what happened here. You just need to look at the numbers.
Oh, and yes: Musk himself admitted in a podcast interview with MAGA influencer and former DOGE employee Katie Miller (wife of Stephen) in December that DOGE had fallen short and said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t do it again, preferring instead to have “worked on my companies.” The man who was going to supposedly save the republic from government bloat decided his actual companies were more worth his time. Musk’s public admission probably shouldn’t carry too much weight either way — he knows DOGE was publicly perceived as a failure and he’s distancing himself — but it is a fitting coda.
This whole thing was billed not just by MAGA faithful, but also by many in the media, as an expected triumph of private sector brilliance over government incompetence. What it actually demonstrated is that when you hand the keys to people who don’t understand how government works, don’t respect the people who do, and have massive personal financial conflicts of interest, you get chaos, corruption, and a bigger bill for taxpayers. The people who were making government work better — the original U.S. Digital Service employees who were building more efficient systems and better websites — got fired and replaced with Musk acolytes who couldn’t tell the difference between a contract ceiling and actual spending.
The MAGA world continues to pretend DOGE was a ruthless cost-cutting machine. The receipts say otherwise: it failed in every direction except enriching corporations connected to the administration. It was a looting operation dressed up as reform.
From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote about it when a 25-year-old was pushing untested code into the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system. We published a piece about it, originally reported by ProPublica, when DOGE operatives stormed into Social Security headquarters and demanded access to everything while ignoring the career staff who actually understood the systems.
That ProPublica deep dive painted a picture of 21-to-24-year-olds who didn’t understand the systems they were demanding access to, had “pre-ordained answers and weren’t interested in anything other than defending decisions they’d already made,” and were operating with essentially no accountability. The former acting commissioner described the operation as “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time.”
These are the people who were handed the keys to the most sensitive databases the federal government holds.
And now we have what appears to be the entirely predictable consequence of all of that: direct exfiltration of data in a manner known to break the law, but zero concern over that fact, because of the assurances of a Trump pardon if caught.
The Washington Post has a stunning whistleblower report alleging that a former DOGE software engineer, who had been embedded at the Social Security Administration, walked out with databases containing records on more than 500 million living and dead Americans—on a thumb drive—and then allegedly tried to get colleagues at his new private sector job to help him upload the data to company systems.
According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.
In the past, this was the kind of thing that the US government actually did a decent job protecting and keeping private. Now they have DOGE bros walking out the door with it on thumbdrives. Holy shit!
And here’s the detail that really tells you everything about the culture DOGE created inside these agencies:
He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.
According to this complaint, this person allegedly understood that what he was doing might be illegal, did it anyway, and had already calculated that the political environment would protect him from consequences. The Elon Musk DOGE bros clearly believed they ran the show and that anyone associated with DOGE was entirely above the law on anything they did.
Perhaps just as troubling, the complaint also alleges that after leaving government employment, the DOGE bro claimed he still had his agency computer and credentials, which he described as carrying “God-level” security access to Social Security’s systems.
The complaint alleges that after leaving government employment, the former DOGE member told colleagues he had a thumb drive with Social Security data and had kept his agency computer and credentials, which he allegedly said carried largely unrestricted “God-level” security access to the agency’s systems — a level of access no other company employee had been granted in its work with SSA.
The Social Security Administration says he had turned in his laptop and lost his credential privileges when he departed. His lawyer denies all alleged wrongdoing, and both the agency and the company said they investigated the claims and didn’t find evidence to confirm them. The company said it conducted a “thorough” two-day internal investigation.
Two whole days! Investigating themselves. On an issue where ignoring it benefits them.
But the SSA’s inspector general is investigating, and has alerted Congress and the Government Accountability Office, which has its own audit of DOGE’s data access underway.
And this whistleblower complaint, filed back in January, surfaces alongside a separate complaint from the SSA’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, which alleges that DOGE members improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud.
A separate complaint, made in August by the agency’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, alleges members of DOGE improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud, putting individuals’ private information at risk. In January, the Trump administration acknowledged DOGE staffers were responsible for separate data breaches at the agency, including sharing data through an unapproved third-party service and that one of the DOGE staffers signed an agreement to share data with an unnamed political group aiming to overturn election results in several states.
We wrote about that other leak at the time, of a DOGE bro sharing data with an election denier group.
All of this just confirms what many people expected and none of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention: Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk and his crew of over-confident know-nothings to view federal government computer systems as their personal playthings, where they could access and exfiltrate any data they wanted for whatever ideological reason they wanted.
And we’re only hearing about this because a whistleblower came forward and because a former chief data officer had the courage to file a complaint. How many similar incidents happened at other agencies where no one spoke up? DOGE operatives were embedded across the entire federal government, accessing heavily restricted databases and, as the Washington Post puts it, “merging long-siloed repositories.” Every single one of those agencies had the same dynamic: young, inexperienced but overconfident engineers demanding unfettered access, career staff pushing back and being overruled, and essentially no security protocols being followed.
Former chief data officer Borges put it about as well as anyone could:
“This is absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Borges told The Post. “There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”
Once it’s out, you can’t put it back. We’re going to be learning about the consequences of DOGE’s ransacking of federal systems for years, maybe decades. And we’re finding out that the waste, fraud, and abuse we were told DOGE was there to find, appears to have mostly been in their own actions.
We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn’t without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access.
But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, community fiber, and into the pockets of billionaire Elon Musk. In exchange for congested, expensive, Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband access the company planned to deploy anyway.
This alone was a pretty big grift. But Trump has also threatened to illegally withhold planed state broadband grants if they dare try to make sure the resulting taxpayer broadband is affordable, or attempt to hold companies accountable for failing to delivered promised service.
“The concessions sought by SpaceX “would limit Starlink’s performance obligations, payment schedules, non-compliance penalties, reporting expectations, and labor and insurance standards,” wrote Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute. Garner argued that SpaceX’s demands illustrate problems in how the Trump NTIA rewrote program rules to increase reliance on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers.”
So basically Musk — who likes to pretend he hates subsidies despite his entire existence being propped up by them — wants untold billions in new subsidies and no serious way for his company to be held accountable should it fail to deliver the promised, substandard product.
Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of “open access” fiber networks that generate local competition and challenge regional monopolies by dramatically lowering the cost of market entry. From there, you’d address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G.
Only then would you fill in the remaining holes with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband options like Starlink, which are ideally suited only for the most remote areas (and even then, Starlink is generally too expensive for most of the lower-income rural Americans who really need it).
Republicans have, in an open act of corruption, thrown this entire logic on its head to curry favor with their favorite white supremacist extremist billionaire. They’re prioritizing Elon Musk’s substandard satellite network (which will only become more congested as more people use it), then ensuring nobody can meaningful hold Musk accountable when he inevitably fails to deliver reliable, affordable access.
Who is going to hold Musk accountable if he fails to deliver? Trump’s bootlicker at the FCC, Brendan Carr? The FTC, where Trump illegally fired all the Dem Commissioners? The NTIA, which is now run by a former Ted Cruz staffer who thinks affordable fiber optic broadband is “woke?” States, who risk losing out on a generational influx of subsidies if they challenge Elon Musk’s greed or stand up to telecoms?
Musk’s DOGE was always about destroying the regulatory state so he and other billionaires could sell the country for scrap off the back loading dock under the pretense of innovative efficiencies while being slathered with tax cuts and subsides. It’s grotesque, historic levels of corruption in a fucking hat.
The business and telecom press (and many folks in policy circles) have also already seemingly normalized hijacking a massive subsidy program to the benefit of a white supremacist billionaire. But as somebody that’s been studying the challenges of broadband access for a quarter century, I guarantee that we’re going to be documenting the damage (and lost potential) of this corruption for decades to come.
We spent a lot of time last year calling out how dangerous it was that Elon Musk and his inexperienced 4chan-loving DOGE boys were gaining access to some of the most secure government systems. We also highlighted how it seemed likely that they were violating many laws in the process. One specific point of concern was DOGE’s desire to take control over Social Security data, something that many people warned would be abused for political reasons, in particular to make misleading or false claims about voting records.
For all the people who insisted that this was hyperbolic nonsense, and DOGE was just there to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” well… the DOJ last week quietly admitted that the DOGE boys almost certainly violated the Hatch Act and had given social security data to conspiracy theorists claiming Trump won the 2020 election (he did not).
Oh, and this only came out because the DOJ realized it had lied to a court (they claim it was because the Social Security Administration officials had given them bad info, but the net effect is the same) and had to correct the record.
Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.
Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.
Also in his March 12 declaration, Mr. Russo attested that, “[t]he overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs and to provide recommendations for action to the Acting Commissioner of SSA, the SSA Office of the Inspector General, and the Executive Office of the President.”….
However, SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025,a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rollsthat the advocacy group had acquired.The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election resultsin certain States. In connection with these communications,one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.
The filing goes on to admit that the declaration from a Social Security administration employee that there were safeguards in place against sharing data, and that everyone had received training in not sharing data, was apparently wrong.
However, SSA has learned that, beginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.
Cool cool. No big deal. DOGE boys just put incredibly private data on a third party server and no one knows what data was there or even if it’s still there.
Have I got some waste, fraud, and abuse for you to check out!
Separately, the filing reveals that Elon Musk’s right hand man, Steve Davis—the “fixer” Musk deploys across all his organizations—was copied on an email containing an encrypted file of SSA data. The filing is careful to note that DOGE itself “never had access to SSA systems of record,” but that’s a distinction without much difference when your guy is getting emailed password-protected files derived from those systems. Oh and: SSA still can’t open the file to figure out exactly what was in it.
However, SSA has determined that on March 3, 2025—three weeks prior to entry of the TRO—an SSA DOGE Team member copied Mr. Steve Davis, who was then a senior advisor to Defendant U.S. DOGE Temporary Organization, as well as a DOGE-affiliated employee at the Department of Labor (“DOL”), on an email to Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.
Looks like some more waste, fraud, and abuse right there.
So to recap: the team that stormed in to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” committed what looks an awful lot like actual fraud and abuse—sharing data on unauthorized servers, misleading courts, cutting deals with election conspiracy groups, and emailing around encrypted files of PII that the agency itself can’t even open anymore. All of it now documented in federal court filings—not that anyone will do anything about it. Accountability is for people who don’t have Elon Musk on speed dial.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.There are additional (exceptional!) imagery in the original.
When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry.
Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the relative safety of the open Atlantic Ocean. The company planned as many as five such launches a year as it perfected the craft, a version of which is supposed to one day land on the moon.
The FAA, which also oversees commercial space launches, predicted the impact to the national airspace would be “minor or minimal,” akin to a weather event, the agency’s 2022 approval shows. No airport would need to close and no airplane would be denied access for “an extended period of time.”
But the reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety.
A ProPublica investigation, based on agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, air traffic control recordings and photos and videos of the events, found that by authorizing SpaceX to test its experimental rocket over busy airspace, the FAA accepted the inherent risk that the rocket might put airplane passengers in danger.
And once the rocket failed spectacularly and that risk became real, neither the FAA nor Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought to revoke or suspend Starship’s license to launch, a move that is permitted when “necessary to protect the public health and safety.” Instead, the FAA allowed SpaceX to test even more prototypes over the same airspace, adding stress to the already-taxed air traffic control system each time it launched.
The first two Starship explosions last year forced the FAA to make real-time calls on where to clear airspace and for how long. Such emergency closures camewith little or no warning, ProPublica found, forcing pilots to suddenly upend their flight plans and change course in heavily trafficked airspace to get out of the way of falling debris. In one case, a plane with 283 people aboard ran low on fuel, prompting its pilot to declare an emergency and cross a designated debris zone to reach an airport.
The world’s largest pilots union told the FAA in October that such events call into question whether “a suitable process” is in place to respond to unexpected rocket mishaps.
“There is high potential for debris striking an aircraft resulting in devastating loss of the aircraft, flight crew, and passengers,” wrote Steve Jangelis, a pilot and aviation safety chair.
The FAA said in response to questions that it “limits the number of aircraft exposed to the hazards, making the likelihood of a catastrophic event extremely improbable.”
Yet for the public and the press, gauging that danger has been difficult. In fact, nearly a year after last January’s explosion, it remains unclear just how close Starship’s wreckage came to airplanes. SpaceX estimated where debris fell after each incident and reported that information to the federal government. But the company didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for that data, and the federal agencies that have seen it, including the FAA, haven’t released it. The agency told us that it was unaware of any other publicly available data on Starship debris.
In public remarks, Musk downplayed the risk posed by Starship. To caption a video of flaming debris in January, he wrote, “Entertainment is guaranteed!” and, after the March explosion, he posted, “Rockets are hard.” The company has been more measured, saying it learns from mistakes, which “help us improve Starship’s reliability.”
For airplanes traveling at high speeds, there is little margin for error. Research shows as little as 300 grams of debris — or two-thirds of a pound — “could catastrophically destroy an aircraft,” said Aaron Boley, a professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the danger space objects pose to airplanes. Photographs of Starship pieces that washed up on beaches show items much bigger than that, including large, intact tanks.
“It doesn’t actually take that much material to cause a major problem to an aircraft,” Boley said.
In response to growing alarm over the rocket’s repeated failures, the FAA has expanded prelaunch airspace closures and offered pilots more warning of potential trouble spots. The agency said it also required SpaceX to conduct investigations into the incidents and to “implement numerous corrective actions to enhance public safety.” An FAA spokesperson referred ProPublica’s questions about what those corrective actions were to SpaceX, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Experts say the FAA’s shifting approach telegraphs a disquieting truth about air safety as private companies increasingly push to use the skies as their laboratories: Regulators are learning as they go.
During last year’s Starship launches, the FAA was under pressure to fulfill a dual mandate: to regulate and promote the commercial space industry while keeping the flying public safe, ProPublica found. In his October letter, Jangelis called the arrangement “a direct conflict of interest.”
In an interview, Kelvin Coleman, who was head of FAA’s commercial space office during the launches, said his office determined that the risk from the mishaps “was within the acceptable limits of our regulations.”
But, he said, “as more launches are starting to take place, I think we have to take a real hard look at the tools that we have in place and how do we better integrate space launch into the airspace.”
“We Need to Protect the Airspace”
On Jan. 16, 2025, as SpaceX prepared to launch Starship 7 from Boca Chica, Texas, the government had to address the possibility the giant rocket would break up unexpectedly.
Using debris modeling and simulations, the U.S. Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, helped the FAA draw the contours of theoretical “debris response areas” — no-fly zones that could be activated if Starship exploded.
With those plans in place, Starship Flight 7 lifted off at 5:37 p.m. EST. About seven minutes later, it achieved a notable feat: Its reusable booster rocket separated, flipped and returned to Earth, where giant mechanical arms caught it as SpaceX employees cheered.
But about 90 seconds later, as Starship’s upper stage continued to climb, SpaceX lost contact with it. The craft caught fire and exploded, far above Earth’s surface.
A pilot on a flight from Miami to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, recorded video of space debris visible from the cockpit while flying at 37,000 feet. Provided to ProPublica
Air traffic control’s communications came alive with surprised pilots who saw the accident, some of whom took photos and shot videos of the flaming streaks in the sky:
Pilot: I just got a major streak going for at least 60 miles, all these different colors. Just curious but — it looked like it was coming towards us, but obviously because of the distance …. Just letting you know. Controller: Can you, can you give an estimate on how far away it is?
Another controller warned a different pilot of debris in the area:
Controller: Due to a space vehicle mishap — a rocket launch that basically exploded between our airspace and Miami — I’m going to give you holding instructions because there was debris in the area, so I’m going to keep you away from it.
Two FAA safety inspectors were in Boca Chica to watch the launch at SpaceX’s mission control, said Coleman, who, for Flight 7, was on his laptop in Washington, D.C., receiving updates.
As wreckage descended rapidly toward airplanes’ flight paths over the Caribbean, the FAA activated a no-fly zone based on the vehicle’s last known position and prelaunch calculations. Air traffic controllers warned pilots to avoid the area, which stretched hundreds of miles over a ribbon of ocean roughly from the Bahamas to just east of St. Martin, covering portions of populated islands, including all of Turks and Caicos. While the U.S. controls some airspace in the region, it relies on other countries to cooperate when it recommends a closure.
The FAA also cordoned off a triangular zone south of Key West.
When a pilot asked when planes would be able to proceed through the area, a controller replied:
Controller: The only information I got is that the rocket exploded so we need to protect the airspace, and Miami and Domingo stopped taking aircraft.
There were at least 11 planes in the closed airspace when Starship exploded, and flight tracking data shows they hurried to move out of the way, clearing the area within 15 minutes. Such maneuvers aren’t without risk. “If many aircraft need to suddenly change their routing plans,” Boley said, “then it could cause additional stress” on an already taxed air traffic control system, “which can lead to errors.”
That wasn’t the end of the disruption though. The FAA kept the debris response area, or DRA, active for another 71 minutes, leaving some flights in a holding pattern over the Caribbean. Several began running low on fuel and some informed air traffic controllers that they needed to land.
“We haven’t got enough fuel to wait,” said one pilot for Iberia airlines who was en route from Madrid with 283 people on board.
The controller warned him that if he proceeded across the closed airspace, it would be at his own risk:
Controller: If you’re going to pass through the DRA, you guys’re going to need to declare an emergency. That’s what my supervisor — if you’re going to land at San Juan, you need to declare an emergency for fuel reasons, that’s what my supervisor just told me. Pilot: In that case, we declare emergency. Mayday mayday mayday.
The plane landed safely in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Iberia did not respond to requests for comment, but in statements to ProPublica, other airlines downplayed the launch fallout. Delta, for example, said the incident “had minimal impact to our operation and no aircraft damage.” The company’s “safety management system and our safety culture help us address potential issues to reinforce that air transportation remains the safest form of travel in the world,” a spokesperson said.
After the incident, some pilots registered concerns with the FAA, which was also considering a request from SpaceX to increase the number of annual Starship launches from five to 25.
“Last night’s Space X rocket explosion, which caused the diversion of several flights operating over the Gulf of Mexico, was pretty eye opening and scary,” wrote Steve Kriese in comments to the FAA, saying he was a captain for a major airline and often flew over the Gulf. “I do not support the increase of rocket launches by Space X, until a thorough review can be conducted on the disaster that occurred last night, and safety measures can be put in place that keeps the flying public safe.”
Kriese could not be reached for comment.
The Air Line Pilots Association urged the FAA to suspend Starship testing until the root cause of the failure could be investigated and corrected. A letter from the group, which represents more than 80,000 pilots flying for 43 airlines, said flight crews traveling in the Caribbean didn’t know where planes might be at risk from rocket debris until after the explosion.
“By that time, it’s much too late for crews who are flying in the vicinity of the rocket operation, to be able to make a decision for the safe outcome of the flight,” wrote Jangelis, the pilot and aviation safety chair for the group. The explosion, he said, “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights.”
In response, the FAA said it would “review existing processes and determine whether additional measures can be taken to improve situational awareness for flight crews prior to launch.”
According to FAA documents, the explosion propelled Starship fragments across an area nearly the size of New Jersey. Debris landed on beaches and roadways in Turks and Caicos. It also damaged a car. No one was injured.
Three months later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was evaluating potential impacts to marine life, sent the FAA a report with a map of where debris from an explosion could fall during future Starship failures. The estimate, which incorporated SpaceX’s own data from the Starship 7 incident, depicted an area more than three times the size of the airspace closed by the FAA.
In a statement, an FAA spokesperson said NOAA’s map was “intended to cover multiple potential operations,” while the FAA’s safety analysis is for a “single actual launch.” A NOAA spokesperson said that the map reflects “the general area where mishaps could occur” and is not directly comparable with the FAA’s no-fly zones.
Nevertheless Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said the illustration suggested the no-fly zones the FAA activated may not fully capture how far and wide debris spreads after a rocket breakup. The current predictive science, he said, “carries significant uncertainty.”
At an industry conference a few weeks after the January explosion, Shana Diez, a SpaceX executive, acknowledged the FAA’s challenges in overseeing commercial launches.
“The biggest thing that we really would like to work with them on in the future is improving their real time awareness of where the launch vehicles are and where the launch vehicles’ debris could end up,” she said.
“We’re Too Close to the Debris”
On Feb. 26 of last year, with the investigation into Starship Flight 7 still open, the FAA cleared Flight 8 to proceed, saying it “determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements.”
The action was allowed under a practice that began during the first Trump administration, known as “expedited return-to-flight,” that permitted commercial space companies to launch again even before the investigation into a prior problematic flight was complete, as long as safety systems were working properly.
Coleman, who took a voluntary separation offer last year, said that before granting approval, the FAA confirmed that “safety critical systems,” such as the rocket’s ability to self-destruct if it went off course, worked as designed during Flight 7.
By March 6, SpaceX was ready to launch again. This time the FAA gave pilots a heads-up an hour and 40 minutes before liftoff.
“In the event of a debris-generating space launch vehicle mishap, there is the potential for debris falling within an area,” the advisory said, again listing coordinates for two zones in the Gulf and Caribbean.
The FAA said a prelaunch safety analysis, which includes planning for potential debris, “incorporates lessons learned from previous flights.” The zone described in the agency’s advisory for the Caribbean was wider and longer than the previous one, while the area over the Gulf was significantly expanded.
Flight 8 launched at 6:30 p.m. EST and its booster returned to the launchpad as planned. But a little more than eight minutes into the flight, some of Starship’s engines cut out. The craft went into a spin and about 90 seconds later SpaceX lost touch with it and it exploded.
The FAA activated the no-fly zones less than two minutes later, using the same coordinates it had released prelaunch.
Even with the advance warning, data shows at least five planes were in the debris zones at the time of the explosion, and they all cleared the airspace in a matter of minutes.
A pilot on one of those planes, Frontier Flight 081, told passengers they could see the rocket explosion out the right-side windows. Dane Siler and Mariah Davenport, who were heading home to the Midwest after vacationing in the Dominican Republic, lifted the window shade and saw debris blazing across the sky, with one spot brighter than the rest.
“It literally looked like the sun coming out,” Siler told ProPublica. “It was super bright.”
They and other passengers shot videos, marveling at what looked like fireworks, the couple said. The Starship fragments appeared to be higher than the plane, many miles off. But before long, the pilot announced “I’m sorry to report that we have to turn around because we’re too close to the debris,” Siler said.
Frontier did not respond to requests for comment.
The FAA lifted the restriction on planes flying through the debris zone about 30 minutes after Starship exploded, much sooner than it had in January. The agency said that the Space Force had “notified the FAA that all debris was down approximately 30 minutes after the Starship Flight 8 anomaly.”
But in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Space Force acknowledged that it did not track the debris in real time. Instead, it said “computational modeling,” along with other scientific measures, allowed the agency to “predict and mitigate risks effectively.” The FAA said “the aircraft were not at risk” during the aftermath of Flight 8.
Experts told ProPublica that the science underlying such modeling is far from settled, and the government’s ability to anticipate how debris will behave after an explosion like Starship’s is limited. “You’re not going to find anybody who’s going to be able to answer that question with any precision,” said John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. “At best, you have an educated guess. At worst, it’s just a potshot.”
Where pieces fall — and how long they take to land — depends on many factors, including atmospheric winds and the size, shape and type of material involved, experts said.
During the breakup of Flight 7, the FAA kept airspace closed for roughly 86 minutes. However, Diez, the SpaceX executive, told attendees at the industry conference that, in fact, it had taken “hours” for all the debris to reach the ground. The FAA, SpaceX and Diez did not respond to follow-up questions about her remarks.
It’s unclear how accurate the FAA’s debris projections were for the March explosion. The agency acknowledged that debris fell in the Bahamas, but it did not provide ProPublica the exact location, making it impossible to determine whether the wreckage landed where the FAA expected. While some of the country’s islands were within the boundaries of the designated debris zone, most were not. Calls and emails to Bahamas officials were not returned.
The FAA said no injuries or serious property damage occurred.
FAA Greenlights More Launches
By May, after months of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashing spending and firing workers at federal agencies across Washington, the FAA granted SpaceX’s request to exponentially increase the number of Starship launches from Texas.
Starship is key to “delivering greater access to space and enabling cost-effective delivery of cargo and people to the Moon and Mars,” the FAA found. The agency said it will make sure parties involved “are taking steps to ensure the safe, efficient, and equitable use” of national airspace.
The U.S. is in a race to beat China to the lunar surface — a priority set by Trump’s first administration and continued under President Joe Biden. Supporters say the moon can be mined for resources like water and rare earth metals, and can offer a place to test new technologies. It could also serve as a stepping stone for more distant destinations, enabling Musk to achieve his longstanding goal of bringing humans to Mars.
Trump pledged last January that the U.S. will “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
But with experimental launches like Starship’s, Jangelis said, the FAA should be “as conservative as possible” when managing the airspace below them.
“We expect the FAA to make sure our aircraft and our passengers stay safe,” he said. “There has to be a balance between the for-profit space business and the for-profit airlines and commerce.”
A More Conservative Approach
In mid-May, United Kingdom officials sent a letter to their U.S. counterparts, asking that SpaceX and the FAA change Starship’s flight path or take other precautions because they were worried about the safety of their Caribbean territories.
The following day, the FAA announced in a news release that it had approved the next Starship launch, pending either the agency’s closure of the investigation into Flight 8 or granting of a “return to flight” determination.
A week later, with the investigation into Flight 8 still open, the agency said SpaceX had “satisfactorily addressed” the causes of the mishap. The FAA did not detail what those causes were at the time but said it would verify that the company implemented all necessary “corrective actions.”
This time the FAA was more aggressive on air safety.
The agency preventively closed an extensive swath of airspace extending 1,600 nautical miles from the launch site, across the Gulf of Mexico and through part of the Caribbean. The FAA said that 175 flights or more could be affected, and it advised Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport to close during the launch.
The agency said the move was driven in part by an “updated flight safety analysis” and SpaceX’s decision to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster — something the company had never tried before. The agency also said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom, Turks & Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba.”
Coleman told ProPublica that the concerns of the Caribbean countries, along with Starship’s prior failures, helped convince the FAA to close more airspace ahead of Flight 9.
On May 27, the craft lifted off at 7:36 p.m. EDT, an hour later than in March and two hours later than in January. The FAA said it required the launch window to be scheduled during “non-peak transit periods.”
This mission, too, ended in failure.
Starship’s Super Heavy booster blew up over the Gulf of Mexico, where it was supposed to have made what’s called a “hard splashdown.”
In response, the FAA again activated an emergency no-fly zone. Most aircraft had already been rerouted around the closed airspace, but the agency said it diverted one plane and put another in a holding pattern for 24 minutes. The FAA did not provide additional details on the flights.
According to the agency, no debris fell outside the hazard area where the FAA had closed airspace. Pieces from the booster eventually washed up on Mexico’s beaches.
Starship’s upper stage reached the highest planned point in its flight path, but it went into a spin on the way down, blowing up over the Indian Ocean.
The Path Ahead
A map released by the FAA shows potential no-fly zones planned for future Starship launches that would cross over a portion of Florida. Air hazard areas — the AHAs on this map — are paths that would be cleared of air traffic before launches. Federal Aviation Administration
SpaceX launched Starship again in August and October. Unlike the prior flights, both went off without incident, and the company said it was turning its focus to the next generation of Starship to provide “service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
But about a week later, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would open up SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract for a crewed lunar lander to rival companies. SpaceX is “an amazing company,” he said on CNBC. “The problem is, they’re behind.”
Musk pushed back, saying on X that “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.” He insulted Duffy, calling him “Sean Dummy” and saying “The personresponsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”
The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment or make Duffy available.
In a web post on Oct. 30, SpaceX said it was proposing “a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations” that would “result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”
SpaceX is now seeking FAA approval to add new trajectories as Starship strives to reach orbit. Under the plan, the rocket would fly over land in Florida and Mexico, as well as the airspace of Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, likely disrupting hundreds of flights.
In its letter, the pilots’ union told the FAA that testing Starship “over a densely populated area should not be allowed (given the dubious failure record)” until the craft becomes more reliable. The planned air closures could prove “crippling” for the Central Florida aviation network, it added.
Still, SpaceX is undeterred.
Diez, the company executive, said on X in October, “We are putting in the work to make 2026 an epic year for Starship.”
We all know that the US can be hypocritical, but this all seems a bit over the top.
Here’s what actually happened: the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into whether X violated the country’s Online Safety Act by allowing Grok to create and distribute non-consensual intimate images (NCII). This isn’t some theoretical concern—as I detailed last week, Grok has been churning out sexualized images at an alarming rate, with users publicly generating “undressing” content and worse, in many cases targeting real women and girls. UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told Parliament that Ofcom could impose fines up to £18 million or seek a court order to block X entirely if violations are found.
Enter Sarah B. Rogers, the Trump-appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who decided this was the perfect moment to threaten a close US ally. In an interview with GB News, Rogers declared:
I would say from America’s perspective … nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech. Let’s wait and see what Ofcom does and we’ll see what America does in response.
She went further, accusing the British government of wanting “the ability to curate a public square, to suppress political viewpoints it dislikes” and claiming that X has “a political valence that the British government is antagonistic to.”
This is weapons-grade nonsense, and Rogers knows it.
The UK isn’t investigating X because they don’t like Elon Musk’s politics. They’re investigating because Grok is being used to create sexualized deepfakes of real people without consent, including minors. Unless Rogers is prepared to stand up and argue that generating non-consensual sexualized imagery of real people—including children—is somehow quintessential “conservative speech” that the US must defend, she’s deliberately mischaracterizing what’s happening here. Is that really the hill the State Department wants to die on? That deepfake NCII is conservative speech?
As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson put it:
“It’s about the generation of criminal imagery of children and women and girls that is not acceptable. We cannot stand by and let that continue. And that is why we’ve taken the action we have.”
But here’s where the hypocrisy becomes truly spectacular: just this week, the Republican-led Senate unanimously passed the DEFIANCE Act for the second time. This legislation would create a federal civil cause of action allowing victims of non-consensual deepfake intimate imagery to sue the producers of such content. No matter what you think of that particular bill (I have my concerns about the specifics of how the bill works), it’s quite something when you have the State Department’s mafioso-like threat being issued to the UK if they take any action to respond to what’s happening on X at the same time the MAGA-led US Senate is voting unanimously to move forward on a bill that could have a similar impact.
So let’s review the US government’s position:
Banning an entire social media platform because China might access data (that they can already buy from data brokers anyway)? Perfectly fine, rush it through SCOTUS.
Allowing victims to sue over non-consensual sexualized deepfakes? Great idea, unanimous Senate support.
Another country investigating whether a platform violated laws against generating sexualized deepfakes of minors? UNACCEPTABLE CENSORSHIP, NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE.
The MAGA mindset in a nutshell: performative nonsense when it fits within a certain bucket (in this case the “OMG Europeans censoring Elon”) no matter that it conflicts with stated beliefs elsewhere.
It’s important to consider all of this in light of the whole TikTok ban fiasco. When the Supreme Court blessed Congress’s decision to ban an app based on vague national security concerns—concerns so urgent that the Biden administration immediately decided not to enforce the ban after winning in court and which Trump has continued to not enforce for an entire year—America effectively torched its moral authority to criticize other countries for restricting platforms.
As I wrote when that ruling came down, we essentially said it’s okay to create a Great Firewall of America. We told the world that if you claim “national security” loudly enough, with sufficient “bipartisan support,” you can ban whatever app you want, First Amendment concerns be damned. Chinese officials have pointed to the US’s TikTok ban to justify their own internet restrictions, and now we’re handing authoritarian regimes another gift: the US will threaten retaliation if you try to enforce laws against platforms generating sexualized imagery of children.
When you blow up the principle that countries shouldn’t ban apps based on content concerns, you don’t get to suddenly rediscover those principles when it’s your billionaire’s app on the chopping block.
And make no mistake about what Rogers is really defending here. Grok continues to generate sexualized content at scale. Elon Musk continues running X like an edgelord teenager who knows he’s rich enough to avoid consequences, and women—especially young women—continue facing harassment and abuse via these tools.
The State Department’s threats aren’t about defending free speech. They’re about protecting Musk’s business interests. It’s about maintaining the double standard that got us here: American companies can do whatever they want globally, but foreign companies operating in America face existential threats for far less.
The UK is investigating potential violations of laws against generating sexualized imagery of minors and non-consenting adults. If the State Department thinks that’s “censorship,” they should explain why the Senate just voted unanimously to let victims sue over exactly that conduct.
Look, the UK’s investigation may or may not lead anywhere. Ofcom may find violations, or it may not. They may impose fines, or they may not. They may seek to block X, or they may not. But the one thing the US government absolutely cannot do with a straight face is threaten them for even considering it.
You don’t get to ban TikTok and then act outraged when other countries contemplate similar actions against American companies. You don’t get to pass unanimous legislation allowing lawsuits over deepfake NCII while your State Department calls investigations into that same deepfake NCII “censorship.” You don’t get to spend years claiming that national security justifies any restriction on platforms and then suddenly discover that “free speech” means other countries can’t enforce their laws.
There are no principles here, only sheer abuse of power. And Sarah Rogers’s threat to the UK makes that abundantly clear: the rules we claimed justified banning TikTok apparently only apply when we’re the ones doing the banning.
