Elon Musk speaks with US President Donald Trump and reporters in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11. Photo / Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post

As Musk polices his own conflicts, some agencies hear sirens going off

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World

Author: Washington Post,
Publish Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2025, 11:10am

Nasa workers were concerned about disclosing contract details due to Elon Musk’s dual roles.
Musk’s involvement in government raised conflict of interest fears, especially regarding SpaceX and Nasa.
Employees worried about potential misuse of information and pressure on regulatory processes.

When the Office of Personnel Management asked federal workers to explain what they did last week, the email landed with extra weight for workers at Nasa’s Human Landing System programme.

The programme has a lunar lander contract with Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Replying to the email could reveal details of that contract work to Blue Origin’s primary competitor: Billionaire Elon Musk, now a powerful adviser to US President Donald Trump and also the founder of the rocket company SpaceX.

Initially, workers at Nasa were told they didn’t need to respond to the email, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. But then a programme manager for HLS sent a note, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Post, saying she would reply and would “recommend we all do”.

The note urged workers to exclude proprietary or contractually sensitive information. But Nasa workers were nonetheless rattled by the idea of disclosing what they were doing to OPM, an agency run by Musk’s allies – in the latest collision between Musk’s public role and his sprawling business empire.

Since formally joining the Trump administration as a “special government employee”, Musk has said he would recuse himself from tasks that might pose a conflict of interest; the White House has said Musk would police those conflicts himself. But that hasn’t eased concerns in agencies that do business with Musk’s companies or his competitors.

Federal law generally prohibits public officials from working on issues in which they, their families or their outside employers have financial interest, and ethics offices – not the officials themselves – are supposed to decide what poses a conflict. As a special government employee, Musk is supposed to file a financial disclosure form, but it doesn’t have to be made public.

At the Federal Aviation Administration, worry over potential conflicts of interest spiked after revelations the agency is close to shifting work on a US$2.4 billion contract for its communications systems from Verizon to Musk’s Starlink.

“For them to come in and be awarded the contract at the last minute is startling across the board,” said an employee briefed on the agency’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “It’s such a clear conflict of interest.”

Meanwhile, a handful of SpaceX employees have arrived at the FAA and got temporary waivers from conflict-of-interest rules so they can review its technology on behalf of the US DOGE Service, a budget-cutting agency Trump created under Musk’s command (though the White House now says Musk is merely a presidential adviser and DOGE is run by administrator Amy Gleason). At least some of the SpaceX employees have emerged with FAA email addresses.

“FAA’s office of commercial space [flight] regulates SpaceX, and now we have their employees inside our agency while they still serve SpaceX,” said another worker, also speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The worker said “there was some shock to the news” of possibly moving the Verizon contract to Starlink. The internal reaction, the person said, was: “Well, that can’t be good, how that happened.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Musk, saying in a written statement he “is selflessly serving President Trump’s administration as a special government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws”.

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip start-up.

But in the FAA, some people are uncomfortable about allies – or employees – of Musk reviewing an agency that also grants licences to SpaceX and its competitors, according to a different FAA staffer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

“It’s a ‘fox in the henhouse’ situation,” another FAA staffer said.

Such worries are even more prevalent at Nasa, the agency most closely tied to Musk’s business empire. Nasa has invested more than US$15b into SpaceX, according to a Post analysis that cited an agency spokeswoman.

Within days of a DOGE team arriving at the agency, the engineering directorate at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida held a large question-and-answer session, according to an employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. One of nearly 600 attendees spoke up to ask a question that had been on many staffers’ minds, the employee said.

“With Elon seemingly having his hand in everything and SpaceX being a major Nasa contractor,” the employee recalled this person asking, “what should we do regarding any conflicts of interest?”

Leaders in the meeting told staff to pass any concerns up their normal management chain, the employee said. But the response yielded more questions than answers, according to interviews with a half-dozen Nasa employees, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation over criticising Musk publicly. They said Musk’s rapid entry into their agency is stirring alarm that he could try to use Nasa data or weaken its regulatory and safety functions to boost his company’s fortunes.

Even now, DOGE officials can see details of proposals previously submitted to Nasa, giving them insight into topics and tasks the space agency is most interested in funding – as well as contracts SpaceX’s competitors have previously won, the people said. Updates from Nasa employees could also provide insights into works in progress, providing potentially unfair competitive advantages if shared with Musk’s businesses.

“We don’t talk – literally ever – anything about SpaceX to Blue Origin, or anything ever about Blue Origin to SpaceX,” one of the people familiar with the matter said. “That’s, like, sin number one. You do not cross the streams.”

Musk’s powerful status could make work harder for Nasa staffers charged with examining SpaceX’s plans and flagging necessary revisions or safety issues, the employees said. “Frequently, we push back on SpaceX – that is our role as Nasa engineers – and SpaceX has to go back and make changes or provide more backing rationale,” one employee said. “There will be an issue if, for example, we are told not to push back any more.”

Other concerns centre on artificial intelligence. Musk has touted the use of AI to usher in revolutionary change. He also has invested in developing it. But his interest in the technology has disrupted some work by Nasa researchers trying to better understand its potential dangers, one employee said: last week, the authors of a forthcoming report on the challenges AI presents to aviation safety decided not to publish the piece lest the paper draw negative attention from Musk and DOGE.

Other agencies that interact with Musk companies face similar quandaries.

At the Food and Drug Administration, DOGE’s arrival provoked worry over what Musk’s allies might do with a confidential drug approvals database, one employee said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. That’s because Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company, has business before the FDA, as do its competitors.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, staff worried about how to respond to the “What did you do last week?” email, according to an employee of that agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Musk has sparred with the financial regulator for years, saying he does not respect it.

The agency sued Musk in 2018, culminating in settlements that required him and his car company, Tesla, to each pay US$20 million over a tweet in which Musk falsely claimed to have “funding secured” to take the company private. In the last days of the Biden administration, the agency sued Musk again, alleging he was late to publicly declare his stake in the social media site then known as Twitter, enabling him to pay US$150m less for the company.

Musk has elevated a call for “defanging” the SEC.

The OPM email left workers uneasy, the person said: “It was scary because it was originating from outside our chain of command, and it wasn’t clear what the information would be used for.”

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