Did Trump Quietly Kill a Sensitive Pentagon Probe into Elon Musk?
The New York Times revealed last year that Musk and SpaceX failed to meet federal reporting requirements for Pentagon contractors. No one has asked: What’s going on with that today?
In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.
Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.
Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?
When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.
Now Democrats fear that Trump’s firing of the Defense Department IG has had the effect of closing down the IG’s investigation into Musk. And they’re demanding that the Pentagon clarify its status.
“I want to know, where is this investigation?” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), in an interview with me. “My deep concern is that it’s just basically been shut down and buried—and will not be pursued.”
Smith told me that Democrats on the HASC are asking the Defense Department for an update on the IG investigation. It will certainly be interesting to see if the agency clarifies this point, though Smith said there’s “no reason to expect a response anytime soon.”
The stakes around this question are extremely high. As the Times reported, concerns about Musk and national security have intensified so much that even some employees at SpaceX share them. With SpaceX receiving billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon and NASA, Musk has access to classified information, including about U.S. military technology, according to the Times.
As such, Musk—who has top-secret security clearance at SpaceX—is supposed to be subject to continuous vetting by the government. That requires him to report certain details of his private life and travel abroad, enabling the government to gauge whether he’s fit to have access to that classified info.
Yet Musk has failed to meet these reporting requirements since at least 2021, the Times reported, noting that Musk and his team haven’t provided the government with “some details of his travel” and “some of his meetings with foreign leaders.” The paper reported that SpaceX employees who are supposed to ensure adherence to these rules have complained to the IG about Musk’s and SpaceX’s lax compliance.
Meanwhile, back in October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has had numerous conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This included ones in which Putin asked Musk to use his technology to do Russia geopolitical favors, such requesting that Musk “avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”
That prompted Senator Jeanne Shaheen—a senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee—to call on Defense Department IG Storch and the Air Force to probe whether Musk’s conversations with Putin represent a national security risk. These relations “pose serious questions regarding Mr. Musk’s reliability as a government contractor and clearance holder,” Shaheen wrote to Storch.
The IG did undertake a broader review along these lines, as the Times reported. But now, with Storch having been fired and Trump tapping Musk to propose a huge range of spending cuts, we self-evidently need to know what’s going on with that probe. It seems at least possible that the IG’s ouster—and Trump’s ascension—will effectively kill it on Musk’s behalf.
“I requested a DOD IG investigation into Musk’s government contracts because of his well-known relationships with our adversaries,” Shaheen told me in a statement. “My concern has not gone away that he could compromise U.S. interests and national security.” (The department’s press office didn’t respond to an email.)
That’s even more urgent given the extraordinary access to internal government information that Trump has granted to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. As Representative Smith told me, even if it’s perfectly possible that Musk does not pose a security risk, at a minimum this should be reexamined, given his extensive business dealings with China and relations with Putin.
“It’s something you ought to investigate with someone who’s so close to so many crucial U.S. secrets,” Smith told me. “Could he potentially compromise us to adversaries like Russia and China?”
Musk doesn’t believe he should deign to submit to such scrutiny. When the news broke in December that he was the subject of these reviews, he raged that “deep state traitors are coming after me.” In short, when Musk talks about destroying the “deep state,” what he really means (among other things) is that he hopes to destroy any and all mechanisms of transparency and accountability that might restrain him. This, even as he enjoys billions in federal contracts and has been empowered by Trump to reshape the U.S. state to an extraordinarily radical degree, despite not being elected or appointed to a real government position.
Even if you feel certain that Musk is brimming with good will toward the United States and would never dream of putting national secrets at risk with adversaries, this situation should still deeply trouble you. Now that Trump is president, Musk appears largely unshackled from ethical or oversight constraints despite wielding enormous influence over the American government and despite his businesses being deeply intertwined with the U.S. national security apparatus.
It’s not just that Trump—who views Musk as a hugely beneficial ally—fired the independent inspector general seeking to ascertain whether Musk is capable of putting our security at risk. It’s also that Congress under GOP control will never get to the bottom of whether the IG investigation of Musk is alive or will continue.
And what about the probes into Musk by the Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security? Under Trump, are those being permitted to continue? It seems unlikely that GOP lawmakers will evince a hint of curiosity about any of this.
Is Musk meeting basic government reporting requirements for someone so deeply entangled with so many sensitive U.S. interests? Will Trump’s Defense Department require this of Musk going forward? Will Trump ever pick a permanent replacement inspector general—presuming he does this at all—who’s willing to scrutinize whether that is happening with Musk, given their alliance?
The answer to all these questions is: Who knows? As long as Trump and his GOP are in power, the American people probably never will.
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