Since the election, Elon Musk’s influence on President-elect Donald Trump has been anything but subtle.
Musk has practically been living at Mar-a-Lago since Trump won. “He likes this place,” Trump recently said of Musk. “I can’t get him out of here.”
He’s reportedly played a hand in selecting cabinet positions. And last week, as Trump made his way to the site of the sixth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, a Tesla Cybertruck rode along in the middle of his motorcade.
Like many Americans, Republicans in Congress have noticed Musk’s influence on Trump — and they’re hoping the SpaceX CEO will influence the president-elect to make investments in space.
Lawmakers told NOTUS they have broad ambitions of returning mankind to the moon and, eventually, landing Americans on Mars. And they expect Trump, with Musk at his side, to hasten the pace of those efforts by taking an ax to the current spaceflight regulatory apparatus.
“We don’t have a space program that’s worth anything,” said Rep. Rich McCormick, a Republican on the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee. “I’m very thankful for people like Elon Musk. We used to be the innovative country that was leading the world. Now we have to rely on the private industry to keep us competitive.”
At Musk’s invitation, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Ronny Jackson and other Republican allies visited SpaceX’s facilities in Brownsville with the president-elect last week to watch a Starship test flight. Also in attendance was Brendan Carr, Trump’s selection — and Musk’s preferred pick — to lead the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates SpaceX’s telecommunication subsidiary Starlink.
SpaceX itself has accepted billions of dollars in government contracts — much of it shielded from the public — including at least one $1.8 billion agreement to launch hundreds of spy satellites for U.S. national security agencies.
Musk now controls roughly two-thirds of the satellites in orbit around Earth, and the U.S. government is almost entirely reliant on him to deliver payloads to space. Along the way, Musk has tussled with federal agencies like the FCC, the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and others that have fined, sued or investigated the company.
Soon, however, Musk is set to work in Trump’s administration in a role tailored to his desire to eliminate many of the regulations and bureaucrats he has railed against for years.
Chief among them is the Federal Aviation Administration, which holds discretion over whether or not SpaceX receives authorization to launch its often experimental spacecraft.
Musk and the FAA have a less-than-amicable relationship. In September, the FAA proposed a $633,009 fine against SpaceX because the company allegedly failed to follow the licensing requirements during two launches last year. Musk, in turn, vowed to sue the agency, alleging “improper, politically-motivated behavior.”
Lawmakers like Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, have gone to bat against the spaceflight regulator on Musk’s behalf, grilling FAA administrator, Michael Whitaker, after the agency delayed SpaceX’s fifth Starship test flight.
Musk called for Whitaker’s resignation in the wake of that hearing, and Kiley was among the lawmakers invited by SpaceX to watch last Tuesday’s launch in person.
While in Texas, Kiley announced legislation that would stop the FAA from regulating spaceflight entirely, making the Office of Commercial Space Transportation report directly to the secretary of transportation. (Kiley told NOTUS ahead of the trip that his office was already working on the bill.)
“The FAA is not well-adapted to regulating this particular industry and this area,” Kiley told NOTUS. “The U.S. has a huge international lead, in spite of the fact that we’ve kind of gotten in our own way in terms of the government standing in the way of innovation.”
(The FAA declined to comment on Kiley’s proposed legislation.)
Kiley said he had yet to talk to Musk or Trump about the specific bill, but he pointed to broad support for the effort from SpaceX employees who had chafed at the FAA’s actions.
“We’ve talked with a lot of the folks at SpaceX, and they’re very supportive of it,” Kiley said, adding that he’s found that same support among his Republican colleagues.
Cruz said he “absolutely” believes the FAA was overregulating SpaceX, and fixing that has “been a major priority” for him.
“For 12 years, just about every major piece of space legislation that has passed into law I’ve either authored or co-authored, and that was true when I was a brand-new baby senator, and now, as the incoming chairman of the Commerce Committee, that will be a significantly higher priority of the full committee,” Cruz told NOTUS.
Trump and Musk are “very much” on the same page, Cruz said.
“The mission of going back to the moon … and having the first female astronaut land on the moon is very exciting,” Cruz added.
Rep. Chip Roy agreed with his colleagues’ appraisal of an overbearing FAA, but he expressed some hesitation about the influence of industry leaders on government.
“I want to be careful,” Roy said. “Regardless of whether it’s someone that I’m particularly happy with lately, like Elon, or whether it’s someone that I’m maybe less happy with, like big corporate insurance … I don’t want corporate America engaged in cronyism, no matter who’s in office.”
In just a few months, Musk is set to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a commission that’s been suggested by Musk and charged with reining in many of the agencies that have drawn his ire.
The pair have shared the broad contours of their vision for reform: embed “legal experts” in agencies and, with the help of “advanced technology,” identify regulations that Trump could suspend the enforcement of. (Reductions in agency head count ought to be “at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified,” the two wrote.)
SpaceX itself has made no secret of what it hopes to see from the incoming Trump administration and from DOGE.
“Technology is easy. Physics is easy. People are hard. And regulator people are the hardest,” Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said at this year’s Baron Capital conference. “The hope is, with this administration and this committee probably … is that regulation really needs to be reinvented.”
Shotwell echoed Musk’s calls to dramatically reduce the regulatory checklist that precedes launch approvals.
“These are very simple things and yet the regulation for launches, thousands of pages if you were to read all the details,” Shotwell said. “No one’s going to read thousands of pages, right? Five pages. Figure out how to do it in five pages.”
Republicans have largely brushed off possible conflicts of interest related to Musk’s businesses, and even some Democrats appear fine with his level of influence.
Sen. Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who once served on a SpaceX independent safety advisory panel, touted Musk’s achievements in spaceflight.
“My hope is that Elon continues to focus his efforts on being the chief engineer of SpaceX, and he’s done a very good job there,” Kelly said. “We’ll see who the president-elect nominates to be the NASA administrator and the FAA administrator, those positions being incredibly important.”
Rep. Eric Sorensen, a Democrat and the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee’s ranking member, said he expected lawmakers to work in a bipartisan manner to ensure necessary regulations remain in place under the incoming administration.
Sorensen said the Science, Space and Technology Committee is “an incredibly bipartisan committee.”
“I have full faith in the members that serve on that committee that we’re going to make good decisions,” he said.
McCormick, a subcommittee member on the other side of the aisle, vowed to match Musk’s appetite for tearing down the current regulatory apparatus.
“I fought hard to deregulate spaceflight,” McCormick said. “You can make a case that the only advancements in technology we’re really making substantial investments in the military, and that’s not even efficient. So shame on us for that.”
McCormick brushed off Musk’s potential conflicts of interest at DOGE, characterizing it as “basically an advisory board.”
“Every single politician in D.C. has about 1,000 advisers, they’re called constituents and friends and supporters and donors,” McCormick said. “What is he? He’s a donor, he’s a friend. He’s a guy who has Trump’s ear. But guess what? He’s not the only person that has Trump’s ear, so there’s no more threat by him than anybody else — other than the fact that he’s been highly successful.”
Musk sees it a little differently.
In a post on X, the social media site he owns, Musk cast the deregulation of Starship and the creation of DOGE as the sole means of preserving the human species in the event of “extinction events on Earth.”
“Starship will make life multiplanetary … so long as it is not smothered by bureaucracy,” Musk wrote. “The Department of Government Efficiency is the only path to extending life beyond Earth.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Helen Huiskes, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.