Donald Trump recently asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an unofficial initiative for reducing the size of the federal government. It’s not going to be a real department, but its informal advice could guide the budget-cutters at the White House and in Congress.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that one of the key items in the DOGE plan would be to eliminate some federal programs that are funded by Congress but where spending authorization has lapsed. It’s a little preposterous, since the programs without long-term authorization include the entire State Department and veterans’ health care. But one such program is a particularly interesting candidate for the chopping block: NASA.
For over a decade, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has been the recipient of billions of dollars’ worth of NASA contracts. SpaceX would almost certainly not be where it is today without the federal funding that allowed it to pour so many resources into the development and testing of its rockets. NASA helped bankroll the company through its precarious infancy and adolescence — even when those rockets blew up. Thanks to this support, Musk has become one of the space industry’s most prominent leaders and perhaps the world’s most well-known evangelist for colonizing other planets.
With all that the agency has done for SpaceX, what would it mean for Musk’s business were he to eliminate, or even simply shrink, NASA?
Arguably, he’d be protecting SpaceX’s interests — and making it harder for more companies to emulate its blueprint for success. Since the turn of the century, every new administration in the White House has urged NASA’s leadership to nurture a commercial space industry. SpaceX is the poster child for that effort, but now a large number of space startups are vying for a NASA contract that could help them get off the ground (in some cases, literally).
SpaceX is on top right now, and presumably Musk wants to keep it that way. Were NASA programs to be cut, there would be fewer opportunities to award more money to a wider group of SpaceX competitors. Slashing spending might also force the agency to hand off more of its operations to already reliable contractors — such as, you guessed it, SpaceX.
The DOGE plan for efficiency, if fully realized, might just happen to benefit one of its architect’s biggest business interests.
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