2025-03-09 21:00:00
The vice presidency has long been the booby prize of American politics. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” America’s first vice president, John Adams, lamented to his wife in 1793. J. D. Vance has been in office for only 48 days, but he has already found a better use for the largely ceremonial post than many of his predecessors: posting constantly on social media.
Since being sworn in, Vance has opined more than 120 times on X, with some of his missives running hundreds of words long. He has engaged in detailed policy debates, promoted his political allies, and dunked on his critics. Watching the veep unfurl his latest novella on Elon Musk’s platform, many of his progressive critics have smirked: Doesn’t he have better things to do? But mocking Vance’s social-media habit misses its significance.
As the sidekick of a president who charts his own idiosyncratic course, the former senator from Ohio has few avenues for influencing policy and may simply be marking time until he can launch his own bid for the White House. Trump, having decamped to his personal Truth Social platform, has effectively ceded the online arena, and Vance—a New York Times best-selling author and Yale Law–trained debater—has been making the most of it. His posts provide a window into where the vice president thinks the country should go and how he plans to make sure that he is the one to lead it there.
Consider Vance’s careful choice of issues. Since inauguration, he has posted nearly two dozen times critiquing U.S. support for Ukraine, participating in extensive exchanges on the subject. He has never once mentioned Gaza. This is no accident. Cutting off Ukraine unites a large majority of Republican voters. Trump’s plan to “take over” Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is one of the president’s least popular proposals among his supporters.
Vance would surely defend Trump’s Gaza gambit if pressed in a live interview, but the beauty of social media is that he can choose which questions to answer. Trump’s benign neglect of both X and his running mate has allowed Vance to pick his spots. It also allows him to hone in on the worst arguments advanced by the opposition rather than defending the worst ones advanced by his boss and his allies. Where Trump uses social media solely as a one-way broadcast, Vance relishes mixing it up in public, not just posting but replying—often in order to skewer left-wing critics. In doing so, the vice president has flipped the script on anti-Trump media and exposed weaknesses among his cultured despisers.
[Read: The J. D. Vance I knew]
Last month, after Vance told the Munich Security Conference that “you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” the progressive media magnate Mehdi Hasan accused him of hypocrisy. “Hey @JDVance, I know you’re busy lecturing the Europeans on free speech,” he wrote on X, “but have you seen this?” Hasan appended a post about the Trump administration banning the Associated Press from the White House briefing room over its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage. This jibe was nothing new. Since 2016, many left-wing commentators have generated applause on social media by performatively pummeling various Trump officials for their progressive audience. But this time, Vance punched back.
“Yes dummy,” he replied, “I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!” The riposte quickly went viral, racking up nearly 50 million views, more than 15 times as many as Hasan’s original post.
The rapturous response from conservatives shouldn’t be surprising. Vance’s dunk was a perfect fusion of the poles of the pro-Trump camp—a “yes dummy” for the “own the libs” crowd and a debater’s quip afterward for the National Review set. (The vice president conveniently did not answer follow-up questions about Musk’s declaration that week that the makers of 60 Minutes deserved “a long prison sentence.”)
That Vance momentarily got the better of Hasan, himself a potent persuasive force, says less about Hasan than about the general flabbiness of left-liberal media’s approach to Trump. Faced with a shambolic first Trump administration—which didn’t expect to win, wasn’t prepared to make its case to the public, and had alienated many of the most capable mainstream Republicans—Democratic-aligned politicians and pundits have been playing on easy mode since 2016. Operating within the monocultures of academia and media, many of those on the center-left spent more time fending off attacks from their left than worrying about challenges from their right.
Today, the situation could not be more different. Trump has united the Republican Party behind him, and while his administration still has its substantial share of cranks, it also has the benefit of more effective spokespeople—not just Vance, but media-savvy figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and United Nations Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik. And with the information landscape no longer dominated by a few establishment outlets and channels, the administration is able to circumvent legacy media and use podcasts and platforms like X to amplify its message. The game has changed, and Trump’s critics will have to change with it, or get rolled by the likes of Vance.
But just because the rules of engagement have shifted doesn’t mean that Vance will end up the winner. Social media can just as easily delude its users as enlighten them. Whether left or right, internet-poisoned campaigns tend to lose because they convince political partisans marinating among the like-minded on X or Bluesky that their most polarizing positions are ascendant when they are actually alienating to many everyday voters. This is why campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality often self-destruct, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned the hard way in his presidential bid.
[Read: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]
Venturing too far into the Very Online vortex risks leaving behind the people who actually put Trump in office. Many of his voters have no investment in the MAGA universe and its culture-war obsessions; they just want a better economy and less immigration. A successful politician today needs to know how to use social media without being used by it—to appeal to their partisan base without being captured by it.
If anyone is up for this task, it’s Vance. The vice president is used to being the outlier in the room—whether as a conservative in liberal spaces like Yale Law, or as a hillbilly from Appalachia in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley. He has extensive experience making his case to diverse and often hostile audiences. Indeed, Vance’s meteoric rise from little-known law student to vice president is a master class in political persuasion.
First he ensnared Never Trump Republicans and bemused liberals searching for a Trump whisperer from the heartland to explain the 2016 election. Then he won over the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., who helped him secure the 2024 VP nod. He has played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage. Now Vance has set his sights on the Republican Party itself, using social media as a 21st-century bully pulpit to outmaneuver his conservative rivals and liberal critics, and unite the base behind his leadership.
None of this will matter if Trump 2.0 tanks and Vance is seen as an accomplice to national catastrophe. Precisely because he has so little authority, Vance’s fortunes are hostage to those who do. But if the administration completes its term without utterly discrediting itself, the country’s first vice president of social media will be well positioned for a promotion. Maybe all John Adams needed was an X account.
2025-03-09 20:00:00
So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential election, when just a little more than half of America (and a surprisingly diverse group for an anti-DEI candidate) decided to give the job once again to the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
But what was quite different this time was the growing participation from the tech elite, with some falling in line before the election, some waiting until after, and one—Elon Musk—taking an even more prominent role, effectively gaining control of the U.S. government for the price of getting Trump back into power.
For tech leaders at this moment, the digital world they rule has become not enough. Leaders, in fact, is the wrong word to use now. Titans is more like it, as many have cozied up to Trump in order to dominate this world as we enter the next Cambrian explosion in technology, with the development of advanced AI.
I cannot explain fully why a small majority of U.S. voters did what they did, because it is for many and varied reasons, including inflation, immigration, a ginned-up panic over trans athletes, and post-pandemic yips, in which I have only glancing expertise. There is no doubt we all are muddling through unusually aggrieved times. But I can tell you how we got that way, because of the part I do know about, which has been a crucial element to what has happened: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech moguls, and their willful carelessness and sometimes-filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence in managing it.
When combined with a lack of empathy and enormous financial self-interest—which I’ve been pointing out at least since Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: greed (of the few) over need (of the many).
And that has resulted in the damaging and warping and siloing of us all, courtesy of many of the people I wrote about in my book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, about the promise and then souring of Silicon Valley. It is these characters who want to reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once. To update the old Facebook maxim of “Move fast and break things”: Move fast and crush everyone. This was bad enough as a business axiom, but when it’s applied to the entire apparatus of our democracy, it’s terrifying.
My memoir of my decades covering these people—from when they had nothing to now, when they have it all—focused on a range of characters, including the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who was by far the person I most thought of as a true tech visionary. While some might disagree—not everyone was keen on his use of what was jokingly called a “reality-distortion field” conjured up to sell his always nifty hardware—Jobs stood far and away above the men who followed him, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and, of course, Elon Musk of, it’s fair to say, Elon Musk Inc.
Jobs, who was definitely a crafty and manipulative charmer, also had a set of basic values he stayed true to, from protection of privacy to making quality products, unlike this trio for whom the acquisition of wealth, the hoarding of power, and endless self-aggrandizement have become the goal. Unlike Jobs, who left behind a legacy of innovation and even wonder, the titans who followed him are so poor, all they have is money.
To be fair, Musk’s efforts were once certainly loftier— pushing into existence an electric-car industry that had not previously had any traction; cutting the costs of rockets and space travel and much more. Let me clearly acknowledge that this was all indeed inspiring. That is, until his epic megalomania, personal foibles, and other deep-seated character flaws—which had always been there, lurking—took over his mind completely and sent it into the outer limits.
After years of mocking Trump, Musk changed drastically during COVID and became ever more manic and cruel, as he swung hard right down conspiracy highway. That was why I predicted on my book tour in March 2024 that Musk would back Trump extravagantly, even after he had just as vehemently said he would remain politically neutral and promised not to donate to either candidate.
Hello, he is lying, I thought at the time. Under a Biden administration—and then, after he stepped down as nominee, a Harris administration—Musk would have received the usual scrutiny of his businesses. He must have known that under Trump, if he ponied up time and money, and, most especially, if he deployed the platform formerly known as Twitter to power Trump’s propaganda machine, an unfettered billionaire’s paradise awaited him.
Soon enough, besides funding a PAC and taking over Trump’s ground game in swing states, Musk was showing off his stomach while bizarrely jumping up and down on a variety of stages across the nation. And, of course, he was pushing a flood of inaccurate information on X and puckering up to Trump like a particularly enthusiastic remora, sometimes referred to as a suckerfish or shark sucker. (Hey, I don’t make up the words.)
As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, even if it meant cosplaying as a beta to Trump’s alpha. It’s paid off: His net worth has nearly doubled after Trump’s victory—it sits at $348 billion today—with billions more possible as he remakes the government in his image. Soon after Trump’s victory, the president announced the formation of the jokingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—which I suggested might more accurately stand for “Department of Grandstanding Edgelords”—to be run by Musk and (briefly) a fellow look-at-me billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. With its power, staff, and efficacy undefined, it sounded more like an episode of The Apprentice.
Initially, a number of people theorized that this unelected commission was a clever way for Trump to sideline the billionaire who had helped to take him over the line to victory. I myself was not sure Trump would tolerate anyone taking attention off him. But so far, he has.
As of this writing, tens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies. Musk has gotten rid of regulators who just happen to oversee his businesses, in agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and USAID. While Trump has recently made noises about reining in Musk’s power, he also said that if Cabinet members don’t shrink their own agencies, “Elon will do the cutting.” And, anyway, Musk as a long track record of doing whatever he wants.
What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism, and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. As I often point out, the opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.
Before the stakes got even higher, there was a warning about what was happening as AI expanded. With trillions of dollars there for the taking, investments are being made by the same small coterie of companies and people that now controls the entire federal government. So are the important decisions about safety and more, which should be made by an independent and fair government and its citizens.
There are no laws regulating almost any of it, though the Biden administration gave it a shrugging try for a little bit. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention.
“The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy,” wrote one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio. “This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.” This seems vanishingly unlikely today.
Where is the hope, then? One glimmer came to me this past year in an interview I did with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, in which he pointed out that science and illumination were not the immediate beneficiaries of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, in about 1440, though some tie those developments together. In fact, even a century later, Copernicus’s groundbreaking On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres sold only 500 copies. What was a best seller right after the press was in heavy use was a book by an obscure writer named Heinrich Kramer titled “The Hammer of Witches,” a demented treatise on satanic women who stole men’s penises and hid them in a nest in a tree, I kid you not. When we spoke, Harari noted that the popularity of the book spurred witch hunts, in which tens of thousands of people—mostly women—were killed.
“The thing is the printing press did not cause the scientific revolution. No,” Harari told me. “You have about 200 years from the time that Gutenberg brings print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until the flowering of the scientific revolution.”
He went on: “How did, in the end, we get to the scientific revolution? It wasn’t the technology of the printing press; it was the creation of institutions that were dedicated to sifting through this kind of ocean of information, and all these stories and developing mechanisms to evaluate reliable information and to be trusted by the population.”
That is, indeed, the possible exit from the mess we now find ourselves in—swimming in oceans of information with an ever-decreasing number of facts to keep us afloat. Except, unlike the expansion that tech gave to the enlightened before, the institutions of today, such as media, science, and education, are being slowly destroyed by technology. And there seems to be no way out of this world, especially as egomaniacal entrepreneurs like Musk and others fork over small pieces of their vast fortunes to buy up everything from global media to, yes, a president of the United States.
And there they are, thus, everywhere we look, running everything, a fate that Paul Virilio predicted in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct technology journal CTHEORY, when he worried that “virtuality will destroy reality.” That is precisely what is happening 30 years later, although it is much worse than I think we are prepared to acknowledge, even now as Musk presides over Oval Office press conferences and White House Cabinet meetings as Trump’s enforcer and sees himself as a kind of global superhero.
In our many interviews over the years, Musk often referenced science fiction, which he looked to for inspiration. During that 1994 interview, Virilio referenced a short story that I imagine Musk knows, “in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow, which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.”
The interviewer then asks the single best question I have ever heard—a question that I wish I would have had the perspicuity to ask of the many tech leaders I have known over three decades, especially Musk, who via DOGE now is building what techies call a “God view” dashboard of our nation and the world: “But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?”
And from Virilio, the best answer: “We’ll dream of being blind.”
It’s not the worst idea.
This essay has been adapted from the epilogue of Swisher’s book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
2025-03-09 19:30:00
On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.
But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.
Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.
That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.
Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government jobs and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”
Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already-understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”
[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]
But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.
As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.
Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”
The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.
The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.
Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.
“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”
Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.
[Read: Fear of flying is different now]
When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.
Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.
At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.
“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”
The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.
All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement. The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.
Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.
[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]
Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.
“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”
The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”
The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.
In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”
When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.
So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.
Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.
[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]
The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys having signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.
Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”
SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”
In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”
When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.
“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.
Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”
[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]
The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.
“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”
Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”
2025-03-09 19:00:00
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.
Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Shane Harris
The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]
If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.
Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.
The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.
Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.
The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.
An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.
That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]
I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.
The Week Ahead
Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)
Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)
Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)
Essay
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain
By Shayla Love
What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.
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Photo Album
Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.
Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.
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2025-03-09 00:26:22
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Donald Trump’s unpredictable economic policies have rattled the markets and prompted warnings of a possible recession. Panelists joined on Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss new warning signs that indicate a negative impact on U.S. and global economics.
This week, the president announced yet another reversal for tariffs on Mexico and Canada, now saying that he would be pulling back the policies. “The reasons for why he’s imposing these tariffs keep shifting,” Michelle Price said last night. “At some point, the confusion for businesses is going to be worse than the tariffs themselves.”
Joining the guest moderator and staff writer at The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, to discuss this and more: Dan Balz, a chief correspondent at The Washington Post; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent at Politico; Michelle Price, a White House reporter for the Associated Press; Kayla Tausche, a senior White House correspondent at CNN.
Watch the full episode here.
2025-03-08 22:45:00
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning
It’s that time of the year, when clocks become the subject of unusually heated debate. As far as hours go, the extra one that daylight saving time provides is a controversial one. At least a few Americans are such die-hard fans of DST that they choose to live on it all year round. Others are “standard-time stans,” as my colleague Katherine J. Wu calls herself. Whether you’re thrilled about getting more evening sun or wish this whole tradition would disappear, the below reading list has something for you.
On Daylight Saving
Rejoice in the End of Daylight Saving Time
By Katherine J. Wu
It’s the most wonderful day of the year!
The Family That Always Lives on Daylight Saving Time
By Olga Khazan
A new bill proposes making daylight saving time permanent. But for one family, it already is.
Overthrow the Tyranny of Morning People
By Tom Nichols
Leave the clocks alone.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I live in a small village in the Burgundy region of France not far from the vineyards but nestled in a geologic fissure in the calcite plateau that is responsible for all those great wines,” Rachel F. writes. “Winter is a magical time of year.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
