CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

Yeah, there’s definitely a case to be made that federal funding for SpaceX, in the context of Elon Musk’s role with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), could raise conflict-of-interest red flags. Let’s break it down. SpaceX has raked in serious cash from the federal government—over $13 billion in NASA contracts since 2015, plus another $5 billion from the Department of Defense for national security launches, according to spending data from places like USASpending.gov and news reports from early 2025. That’s a hefty chunk of taxpayer money flowing to Musk’s rocket company, making it one of NASA’s top contractors and a key player in military space ops. Meanwhile, Musk is leading DOGE, a White House initiative tasked with slashing government spending and rooting out waste. The overlap is pretty glaring: the guy deciding what’s “wasteful” has a vested interest in keeping his own companies’ contracts intact—or even growing them. The conflict kicks in because DOGE’s mission could...