Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the world.

In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.

At NASA, after repeated nudges by Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.

And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.

Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chainsaw to the apparatus of governing, pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with the New York Times.

Already, some SpaceX employees, temporarily working at the FAA, were given official permission to take actions that might steer new work to Musk’s company.

The new contracts across government will come in addition to the billions of dollars in new business that SpaceX could rake in by securing permission from the Trump administration to expand its use of federally owned property.

SpaceX has at least four pending requests with the FAA and the Pentagon to build new rocket launchpads or to launch more frequently from federal spaceports in Florida and California.

And SpaceX is pushing the Federal Communications Commission for more federal radio spectrum — its Starlink satellite service depends on radio spectrum to send signals back and forth to Earth, meaning if it gets more it can increase its profits — a move its cellular provider rivals see as a power grab. The first of those awards was approved this month, after Trump replaced the head of the FCC with a new chair, Brendan Carr, who has been supportive of Musk.

The potential new revenue stream for Musk’s company comes after he donated nearly $300 million to support the 2024 campaign of Trump as he sought a return to the White House.

Executives at SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that Musk, as a “special government employee,” had received briefings on ethics limits including those related to conflicts of interest and would abide by all applicable federal laws.

SpaceX had built itself into one of the nation’s largest federal contractors before the start of the second Trump administration, securing $3.8 billion in commitments for fiscal year 2024 spread over 344 different contracts, according to a tally by the New York Times of a federal contracting database.

Douglas Loverro, a former senior NASA and Pentagon official who also served as an adviser to the Trump transition team on space issues, said SpaceX deserved to win many of these additional contracts.

“He does have the best tech,” Loverro said of Musk. “All of this will lift the space industry as a whole, obviously — but it will certainly help SpaceX even more.”

Pentagon rising

SpaceX had been working behind the scenes for several years to expand its business with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, hiring former military officials who then reached back into the Defense Department to nudge former associates and friends to buy more SpaceX services.

Gary Henry, a former Air Force space and missile program supervisor, was among them. He joined SpaceX as it was developing Starship, the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.

During Henry’s tenure at SpaceX, the company secured a $102 million Air Force contract to study how Starship could deliver military cargo to points around the world within 90 minutes.

SpaceX is still having trouble getting Starship operational. The two most recent test flights resulted in explosions that sent debris raining over the Caribbean.

Nonetheless, Henry — now back working for the Pentagon as a consultant — is promoting Starship as an option for the military.

The Air Force has disclosed plans to build a rocket landing pad on Johnston Atoll, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, to test these cargo ship landings. The Pentagon’s initial goal: to move 100 tons of cargo per flight, a total that only Starship, at least according to its design, has the power and size to handle.

“It’s frustrating,” said Erik Daehler, a vice president at Sierra Space, which also wants to sell cargo services to the Pentagon. “Things can’t just go to SpaceX.”

Mars bound at NASA

Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire entrepreneur and a space enthusiast. He paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into orbit aboard a rocket twice.

His payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, an investment that generated $25 million in gains in recent years, effectively making him and Musk business partners. That SpaceX stake was recently sold, and Isaacman vowed to sever any remaining financial ties he had with SpaceX.

NASA has already paid SpaceX a total $13 billion in contractual commitments over the past decade. Those deals include hiring SpaceX to deliver cargo and astronauts to orbit and to send NASA’s biggest and most expensive probes into the universe.

Former NASA officials predict that Isaacman will quickly push to revamp the space agency’s Artemis project, which intends to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

Currently, Boeing has one of the main contracts to build the rockets for Artemis. But Loverro and other former agency officials said they expect the government to phase out this rocket, as it is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

This will allow NASA to turn to commercial space companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin to lift astronauts into orbit for future missions to the moon or even Mars.)

Bringing broadband to rural America

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, vowed in his confirmation hearing in January to end the way the Commerce Department manages $42 billion in funding it is distributing to states to expand broadband access. The Biden administration chose to prioritize systems that wired homes directly to internet networks, rather than satellite-based systems such as Starlink.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had already been pressuring the Commerce Department to ease grant rules to allow satellite-based broadband in rural areas, where the cost of running cable can be expensive. Now his former aide Arielle Roth has been nominated to lead the Commerce Department agency that will oversee the grant program.

Starlink had originally been slated to get nearly $1 billion in funding from the FCC’s own grant program before the FCC withdrew the offer in late 2023, saying that the service did not meet agency requirements.

The commission’s board chair has now been taken over by Carr, who had protested the decision to deny SpaceX these funds. Industry analysts and two former FCC members interviewed by the Times said they now expect the agency to once again offer some of these grant funds to Starlink.

The commission also approved a SpaceX request this month, despite protests from Verizon and AT&T, to boost power on its Starlink satellites so they can provide smartphone service directly from orbit, ending cellphone dead zones for some customers.

A victory on each of these fights by SpaceX “could be huge — in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Drew Garner, a researcher at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

There could be long-term costs to consumers.

Monthly satellite subscription costs for consumers are higher than wired internet, in most cases. Satellite-based systems also tend to be slower compared with cables wired to the house.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” wrote Evan Feinman, who led the Commerce Department’s rural broadband program during the Biden administration.

Modernizing aviation

After a fatal midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet in January, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked for Musk’s help.

The FAA, which is trying to modernize its air traffic control and weather data systems, needed a boost in technical know-how, Duffy said.

Teams from SpaceX were brought into the agency to assist with this work.

Musk soon complained on social media that Verizon was moving too slowly on a multibillion-dollar agency contract awarded in 2023 to deliver the new technology.

Theodore Malaska, one of the SpaceX employees working at the FAA, was granted a special ethics waiver by the Trump administration to participate in “particular matters which may have a direct and predictable effect” on the financial interest of SpaceX, according to documents obtained by the Times.

Soon after, Malaska was boasting on X how the FAA was now building SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into agency systems that send weather data to pilots, which could bring future federal business to SpaceX.

“I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly,” Malaska said in a social media posting.

The overlap in these roles — Musk’s employees advising agencies while SpaceX is installing its Starlink devices at agency locations — present an ethical situation that has few precedents in modern U.S. history.

Federal rules generally prohibit awarding contracts to federal employees, including special government employees. Federal employees also are prohibited from taking actions that might benefit their own families or outside entities they have a financial relationship with.

Musk has argued he is not personally involved in pursuing SpaceX contracts. But federal contracting systems require the government to avoid not only actual conflicts of interest, but even the appearance of them.

“By any objective standard, this is inappropriate,” said Steven Schooner, a former government contracts lawyer who is now a professor studying government procurement at George Washington University.