Everyone knows that the Federal Aviation Administration regulates air travel, but fewer know about its Office of Commercial Space Transportation — an office that regulates commercial spaceflight, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Now that Musk and his posse of broccoli-haired children control the purse strings of the federal government, those regulators live in fear: Will Musk take revenge on them for halting SpaceX flights?
ProPublica spoke with a former employee of the regulator as part of a look at Musk’s effect on the Office of Commercial Space Transportation — confusingly officially abbreviated to AST — who was forthright about the mood within the office:
While it’s unclear what changes [Musk’s] panel has in store for the FAA, current and former employees are bracing for Musk to focus on the little-known part of the agency that regulates his rocket company: the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST. “People are nervous,” said a former employee who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Musk.
The tech titan and his company have been critical of the office, which is responsible for licensing commercial rocket launches and ensuring public safety around them. After the fines in September, SpaceX sent a letter to Congress blasting AST for being too slow to keep up with the booming space industry. That same month, Musk called on FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign and told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.”
Musk’s description of the AST as merely moving paper around betrays his thoughts on what happens in government: Not investigation, not protections, but mere formalities. Government paperwork to Musk is a series of rubber stamps that simply take too long, rather than any effort to actually protect people from, say, exploding rockets.
This mindset squares perfectly with Musk’s stated opinion that regulations are inherently wasteful and should be removed. He expressed this on a Twitter space earlier this month, per HuffPost:
President Donald Trump’s “government efficiency” cheerleader Elon Musk proposed simply ignoring all federal regulations during a public call shortly after midnight Monday morning.
Musk, whose newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency” team has in recent days executed a dramatic power grab at several government agencies, called for “wholesale removal of regulations.”
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“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
Musk’s opinion that regulations are “willy-nilly” rather than written in blood aligns perfectly with his view of government: An obstruction to be overcome, circumvented, or destroyed, rather than an organization for the protection of people against corporations. Is it any wonder federal employees are scared, when someone with that mindset is in charge of their paychecks?