WASHINGTON — After the relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk exploded into warfare Thursday, Trump suggested that he might eliminate the tech titan’s federal contracts.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it,” Trump posted on his social media platform.

That’s not as easy as Trump implies. The Pentagon and NASA remain intensely reliant on SpaceX, Musk’s rocket launch and space-based communications company, to get to orbit and move government data across the world.

Trump’s Regulatory Arsenal Against Musk

But there are options available to the president that could make Musk’s relationship with the federal government much more difficult than it has been so far in Trump’s second administration.

Trump’s most accessible weapon to punish Musk is the ability to instruct federal regulators to intensify oversight of his business operations, reversing a slowdown in regulatory actions that benefited Musk’s businesses after Trump was elected.

“In an administration that has defined itself by reducing regulation and oversight, it would not be difficult to selectively ramp up oversight again,” said Steven Schooner, a former White House contracts lawyer who is now a professor at George Washington University.

With a decree, Trump could suspend Musk’s security clearance, a step that the Trump administration has also taken against some of its Biden-era critics. That move would make it harder for Musk to continue in his role as CEO of SpaceX, given its billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts.

Pentagon investigators had been examining whether Musk has violated federal security clearance requirements for disclosing contacts with foreign government leaders, The New York Times reported last year.

SpaceX’s Critical Role in Government Operations

The Trump administration could also slow down new contracts going to SpaceX in the years to come, perhaps by looking for ways to drive more work to its rivals, such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin or the Boeing and Lockheed partnership called United Launch Alliance.

But billions of dollars in financial commitments have been made to SpaceX for launches that will be spread out over the rest of Trump’s term to deliver astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station and even the moon, as well as to send military and spy satellites into orbit.

Moreover, the services SpaceX provides are vital to some of Trump’s top agenda items, such as building a new space-based missile defense program that the Pentagon is calling Golden Dome. That program will require dozens of launches to orbit as well as space-based observation and data transmission systems to track and help intercept missile threats.

SpaceX is by far the dominant global player in these launches. While Blue Origin and other companies like Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are building or have recently built their own new rockets, none has the kind of launch record and reliability that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has.

Overall, the federal government has awarded nearly $18 billion in contracts to SpaceX over the past decade, including $3.8 billion just in the 2024 fiscal year, according to a tally by the Times. That makes SpaceX one of the largest federal contractors, with most of that money coming from NASA and the Pentagon.

Terminating SpaceX’s contracts “would end the U.S. capability to launch astronauts to orbit for the foreseeable future,” said Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of the space consulting firm Astralytical. It would also significantly delay the U.S. effort to return humans to the moon, she said.

Limited Alternatives to SpaceX

Bethany Stevens, NASA’s press secretary, hinted on Musk’s X social platform late Thursday afternoon — as the verbal war between Musk and Trump continued to play out — that the deals with SpaceX are in fact not going to be canceled anytime soon.

“NASA will continue to execute upon the President’s vision for the future of space,” Stevens said, without mentioning Musk or SpaceX by name. “We will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure the President’s objectives in space are met.”

But Trump has more flexibility when it comes to the alphabet soup of federal agencies that regulate SpaceX as well as Tesla, Musk’s car company; X; the Boring Co., his underground drilling outfit; and Neuralink, his computer chip brain implant startup.

The federal government, by most historical and ethical norms, is not supposed to be used as a retaliatory machine to punish political enemies. And that practice by Trump would be abnormal and inappropriate, Schooner said.

But the Trump administration, including the Justice Department, has shown itself willing to take up investigations that target Trump’s enemies or organizations that he dislikes, like Harvard University or even his former aides who have become critics, like Chris Krebs, his former top cybersecurity official.

Before Trump was elected, at least 11 federal agencies had ongoing investigations or lawsuits targeting Musk’s companies. These included the Federal Aviation Administration’s scrutiny of launch safety issues, the Environmental Protection Agency’s inquiry into potential water pollution at SpaceX’s Texas launch site and transportation regulators’ questions about fatal accidents involving Tesla cars using autopilot.

Several of those inquiries were put on hold. In other instances, fines that Musk’s companies had been assessed were being reconsidered, including one that the FAA announced in September for what it said were safety violations during launches in Florida. Trump’s top transportation official vowed at his confirmation hearing to “review” that fine. As of last week, it had still not been paid, an agency official said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service also has slowed down its oversight of SpaceX’s Texas launch site, where the company for years has been accused of damaging adjacent state park and National Wildlife Refuge lands. That enforcement effort could be turned back on almost overnight if Trump ordered it.

But no other U.S. company can currently do what NASA needs.

Boeing, the other company NASA hired to take astronauts to orbit, has yet to complete fixes for its Starliner capsule after a test mission left two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, in orbit for nine months before they finally returned to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Aerospace company Northrop Grumman also has a contract to take cargo to the space station with its Cygnus spacecraft, but the most recent Cygnus had to be scrapped after it was damaged during shipment to Florida for launch.

Elon Musk appears to recognize this leverage he has over NASA.

He initially threatened Thursday, as the war of words with Trump played out, to stop future flights to deliver astronauts to the space station, but he appeared to walk back that threat later in the day.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Eric Lipton and Kenneth Chang/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2025 The New York Times Company