Musk Leverages His Unelected Non-Existent Authority And Expertise To Steal $2 Billion FAA Contract From Verizon
From the what-conflict-of-interest? dept. The post Musk Leverages His Unelected Non-Existent Authority And Expertise To Steal $2 Billion FAA Contract From Verizon appeared first on Above the Law.
The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC clawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn’t deliver consistent speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less capacity constrained options like fiber and 5G should probably be prioritized.
This reasonable ruling resulted in no limit of manufactured grievance in the Trump and GOP extended conspiracy fiction universe, with right wingers falsely claiming that Musk — who insists he hates subsidies until he doesn’t — was somehow being unfairly victimized by the previous administration.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to massively over-compensate for this fake scandal, and slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity.
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed. Which is weird for a DOGE figurehead that professes to care so much about transparency:
“The contract comes while Musk is leading efforts to make deep cuts in federal government spending, including staffing cuts at the FAA, and some critics are raising questions about conflicts of interest over his role overseeing government agencies that are supposed to be regulating his businesses.”
Bloomberg had a little more leaked inside detail, noting the partnership would “eventually” include 4,000 Starlink terminals and be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. Follow up reporting from the Washington Post suggests there’s some consternation about Musk’s giant handout among FAA officials.
In a post to his right wing propaganda platform, Musk stated, without any sort of evidence, that the “Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Basically falsely claiming that Verizon might be killing U.S. air travelers:
I’d just like to pause for a moment to acknowledge that as somebody who has probably written more about Verizon than anybody alive, it takes a very specific type of shitty villain to have me backing Verizon.
Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 eager to get a giant tax cut for doing nothing. And relentless attacks on organized labor. And the total evisceration of corporate oversight of whatever’s left of FCC consumer protection authority. And they’re keen to get their giant $20 billion merger with Frontier rubber stamped.
That’s a lot of potential money at stake, so I’m not sure Verizon will show any backbone and file suit here. But if they don’t, shareholders will certainly have the opportunity to sue. Knowing Verizon’s greasy lobbying and legal practices pretty intimately, it’s all a very leopards-eating-faces sort of affair.
But again, Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
The FAA contract is certainly just the opening salvo for Musk favoritism. The U.S. government has already threatened to pull Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless they sign off on a mineral deal that would be beneficial to Tesla. You probably also missed that USAID officials were investigating Starlink‘s use in Ukraine right before Trump and Musk engaged in a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the agency.
It’s clear the Trump NTIA is also hoping to redirect some of the $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband infrastructure subsidies away from existing projects and toward Musk’s Starlink whenever possible. That’s not just bad due to corruption, but because it’s going to wind up redirecting a lot of taxpayer money away from small local businesses and popular community-owned broadband networks.
Starlink is a good option if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing else. But “I didn’t do the reading” guys like Joe Rogan tend to think Starlink is akin to some kind of magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle around to fix everything.
They like to ignore that the platform can’t really scale, customer service is largely nonexistent, and it’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. They like to ignore that the nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable. They also like to ignore the system is harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. You know, small details.
Rank corruption aside, the GOP is genuinely convinced that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can fix government with a wave of his hand. They genuinely have no idea that this persona was a press-enabled mythology providing cover for a rank opportunist who takes credit for other peoples’ ideas, something the tech press only belatedly discovered during his bungled takeover of Twitter.
So they’re keen on throwing all of their eggs in the Elon Musk basket, fairly oblivious to the fact they’ve given absolute power to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly idea what he’s actually doing. So yeah, a lot of this is just corrupt cronyism pretty typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. But a lot of it genuinely is being driven by rank delusion into Musk’s actual intellect and expertise, which is going to end extremely, extremely badly for absolutely everybody involved.
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