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    US Congress committee investigating Musk-owned Starlink over Myanmar scam centres

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    A powerful bipartisan committee in the US Congress says it has begun an investigation into the involvement of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business in providing internet access to Myanmar scam centres, blamed for swindling billions from victims across the world.The move comes as it was revealed that large numbers of Starlink dishes began appearing on scam-centre roofs in Myanmar around the time of a crackdown in February that was supposed to eradicate the centres, according to a investigation by Agence France-PresseStarlink has come from nowhere to become the war-torn country’s biggest internet provider in three months, data from the APNIC Asian regional internet registry shows.SpaceX, Starlink’s owner, has not replied to AFP requests for comment.The US Congress joint economic committee told the news agency it began an investigation in July into Starlink’s involvement with the scam centres. The committee has the power to make Musk testify before it.China, Thailand and Myanmar forced pro-junta Myanmar militias who protect the centres into promising to “eradicate” the compounds in February. They freed about 7,000 people – most Chinese citizens – from the brutal call centre-style system, which the UN says runs on forced labour and human trafficking.Many workers said they were beaten and forced to work long hours by scam bosses who target victims across the globe with telephone, internet and social media cons.Senator Maggie Hassan, the leading Democrat on the US congressional committee, has called on Musk to block the Starlink service to the fraud factories.“While most people have probably noticed the increasing number of scam texts, calls and emails, they may not know that transnational criminals halfway across the world may be perpetrating these scams by using Starlink internet access,” she said.The senator wrote to Musk in July demanding answers to 11 questions about Starlink’s role.Former California prosecutor Erin West, who now heads the Operation Shamrock group campaigning against the centres, said: “It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen.”While still a cybercrime prosecutor, she warned Starlink in July 2024 that the mostly Chinese crime syndicates that run the centres were using its technology, but received no reply.Americans are among the top targets of south-east Asia scammers, the US treasury department said, losing an estimated $10bn last year, up 66% in 12 months.Up to 120,000 people may be being “forced to carry out online scams” in the Myanmar centres, according to a UN report in 2023.On the Thailand-Myanmar border, new buildings have been springing up inside the heavily guarded compounds around Myawaddy at a fast pace, with some festooned with Starlink receivers, satellite images and AFP drone footage show.Analysis of satellite images from Planet Labs PBC found dozens of buildings going up or being altered in the largest of the compounds, KK Park, between March and September. More

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      Don’t look up: how Trump’s deregulation drive could obscure the stars and threaten our access to space

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      Donald Trump has spent eight months attempting to remake the United States through a massive programme of cuts and deregulation. His administration has left almost no part of American life untouched – from classrooms to college campuses, offices to factory floors; museums, forests, oceans and even the stars.An executive order signed last month to streamline rocket launches has been celebrated by officials in the commercial space sector, who see it as integral to securing America’s primacy as the world leader in space exploration.But it’s also causing a wave of alarm – from scientists, environmental activists and astronomers, who say a growing network of satellite constellations are crowding the skies, obscuring the stars and threatening our very access to Earth’s orbit.From her her isolated farm in Saskatchewan, Samantha Lawler is just one of the many astronomers who has noticed the effect that satellites are having on her work. Lawler can see the Milky Way from her window, but the clear views afforded to her in Canada’s rural heartland are being overwhelmed by Elon Musk’s mission to bring internet to every corner of the Earth.“It has changed how the sky looks,” says Lawler. “I look up and I’m like, ‘oh that constellation looks wrong.’ There’s a Starlink flying through it.”Starlink is the network of satellites, operated by Musk’s SpaceX company, orbiting the Earth providing internet to those in remote, rugged and war-torn locales. But the venture’s lofty goal has come at a price for astronomers like Lawler, who have seen their work become more difficult as the sky fills up with satellites.View image in fullscreenStarlink alone owns two-thirds of all satellites in space. With 8,000 in low Earth orbit, the company currently has permission to launch a further 4,000, and has reportedly filed paperwork to raise the total number to 42,000. Amazon and a state-backed project from China have their own rivals to Starlink in the works, all of which would see the numbers vastly multiply, with some estimates that in a decade there could be 100,000 satellites in orbit.Trump has appeared to back the expansion of America’s commercial space industry, signing an executive order last month that could accelerate the number of rockets and their massive payloads of new satellites, potentially exacerbating the difficulties for astronomers and bringing unintended environmental damage.The fight for spaceCommercial space operations have grown in scale and ambition since the US stepped back from government backed flights and increasingly turned to private companies like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. In recent years, government efforts to regulate the industry have struggled to keep pace with the ambition of these companies operations: in the last four years, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued more commercial space licenses than it did in the entire 32 years before 2021.At various points, the companies themselves have expressed frustration with the government’s regulatory regime – Elon Musk himself threatened to sue the FAA last year for “overreach”.Trump’s August executive order would seeks to eliminate some environmental reviews and launch safety measures contained in previous regulations produced by the president’s first administration, while also preempting some state laws that could hinder the development of private space ports.The FAA itself predicts that the number of commercial launches could almost quadruple over the next decade. With up to 28 satellites launched from a single rocket, the accelerated launch timetable enabled by Trump’s slashing of red tape will be essential if companies like SpaceX are to expand their satellite constellations.The cataclysmic danger of ‘space junk’“What are the skies going to look like?” In a career spent contemplating big questions, it’s perhaps this which is the most existential for Lawler.Her research looks at small icy objects at the edge of our solar system known as Kuiper belt objects. Understanding them could help us form a picture of how the solar system formed and the planets aligned. It’s work that could fundamentally shift our understanding of the very universe we inhabit.“I would love to know what else is out there … what’s beyond the edge of what we know,” says Lawler. “There might be another planet in our solar system. But for the first time it’s getting harder to do the work because of the actions of for-profit companies.”She says that when she points her telescope at the sky her field of view is often obscured by bright streaks of satellites.“The way the satellite streaks appear on the sky, in different seasons and different times of night, it’s actually made it harder to look in one particular direction than in other directions,” says Lawler.View image in fullscreenIt’s a common complaint from astronomers, who also say that the burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere of satellites that have reached the end of their lives could create untold damage.“All that metal, plastic, computer parts, solar panels, that just gets deposited in the atmosphere,” she says, with studies suggesting this could cause ozone depletion and change the opacity of the atmosphere.“We’re just running this experiment and that is really terrifying.”The proliferation of “space junk” in orbit is also of concern to experts. There are about 43,000 objects being monitored in space, most of which are debris from old rockets and disused satellites. The European Space Agency estimates that there are an addition 1.2 million tiny objects between 1cm and 10cm wide.The risk of a runaway collision of debris – a phenomenon known as Kessler Syndrome – is thought to be increasing as the number of satellites multiplies. In such a scenario, one collision sets off a chain reaction which would see more debris produced, until a critical mass of cascading collisions renders orbit inaccessible.Global communications company Viasat paints a cataclysmic picture of the world after such an event: “All of humanity would watch helplessly as space junk multiplies uncontrollably. Without timely intervention, we risk bringing the Space Age to an inglorious end, and trapping humanity on Earth under a layer of its own trash for centuries, or even millennia.”“That’s one of the most ironic things, there’s all this talk that we need to go to Mars, we need to colonise another planet, but all these satellites in orbit actually make it much more likely that there’s going to be a catastrophic collision,” says Lawler.Companies like Starlink are acting to mitigate such an event by building in avoidance systems that manoeuvre their satellites around potential collisions, while scrapping older models that are more at risk.“So far it’s been perfect,” Lawler says.The real risk, she says, will come when the thousands of Starlinks competitor satellites are in orbit in a few years time, with question over how they will coordinate and share data so that other operators know they’re there.View image in fullscreen“Right now one American private company effectively controls orbit,” says Lawler. “If you want to go to a higher altitude orbit, you have to talk to Starlink and make sure that they’re not going to hit your satellite as you go through.”The Guardian has approached SpaceX and the White House for comment.Despite some astronomers calling for a moratorium on rocket launches, Starlink and its celestial competitors show no sign of pausing their ambitions.Starlink appears to be aware of the effects it satellites have of the work of astronomers and has made efforts to make them fainter in the sky. But Lawler says at the same time, the objects have become bigger, “so it just cancels out.”“It’s an engineering challenge that satellite operators need to think more about: How do you deliver your services with fewer satellites? How do you make your satellites last longer?”Despite the cost to her work, she concedes that the service offered by Starlink and its soon-to-be competitors is an engineering miracle. But she believes that the potential downsides outweigh the convenience that they provide.Lawler says it may take a serious collision in orbit to focus the minds of politicians and policymakers to the danger of deregulated commercial space operations, likening such a scenario to a cataclysmic news event like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.“I really am afraid that something very bad has to happen before things will change.” More

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      Pickleball Courts Taking Over Tennis Courts, as Seen From the Sky

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      <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>In its place are four pickleball courts, attached to what is now called the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Our analysis is not comprehensive: By trade group estimates, there are […] More

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      How NASA Would Struggle Without SpaceX if Trump Cancels Musk’s Contracts

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      If President Trump cancels the contracts for Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, the federal government would struggle to achieve many goals in orbit and beyond.In 2006, a small, little-known company named Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — SpaceX, for short — won a NASA contract to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.At that moment, SpaceX had not yet launched anything to orbit and would not succeed until two years later with its tiny Falcon 1 rocket. But since then, the Elon Musk-founded company has become the linchpin of all American civilian and military spaceflight.It started in 2010 with the launch of the first Falcon 9 rocket. By 2012 the launcher was sending cargo to the space station.NASA money helped finance the development of the Falcon 9, and SpaceX capitalized on the NASA seal of approval to entice companies to launch their satellites with SpaceX.It became the Southwest Airlines of the rocket industry, selling launches and hauling satellites into orbit at a lower price than most other rockets then available.That story repeated during the Obama administration when SpaceX won a contract to take astronauts to the space station, which it did for the first time in May 2020 during the first administration of President Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Leaves Washington Less Than Legendary

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      The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk.He fell from grace as effortlessly as he had risen. Like a dime-store Icarus, he took too many chances, never understood the risks and flew too close to the sun. Wrapped in the halo of his social-media superstardom, he was blinded to the reality of his circumstances until it was too late.Mr. Musk has already inked several lucrative federal contracts and could get far more, but he leaves Washington with his reputation as a genius jack-of-all-trades — a reputation he relied on to boost his company’s stock prices and win investors for his ambitious adventures — severely damaged. Once likened to the Marvel superhero Tony Stark, he is becoming increasingly unpopular. Many formerly proud owners of his Tesla electric cars are trading them in or pasting apologies on their bumpers. Sales have plummeted.Mr. Musk is hardly the first wealthy businessman to decamp to Washington: The Gilded Age millionaires, top hats in hand, focused on currying favor with the Senate, where laws were made and tariffs determined. With the collapse of the economy, the New Deal and the coming of a world war, the White House began to play a significantly larger role in directing the economy, and the businessmen paid it more attention. Dozens of them descended on the capital; others joined the cabinet. No matter when or in what position they served, however, they played by Washington’s rules, taking on well-defined, limited responsibilities and, for the most part, staying out of public view.Mr. Musk broke with that tradition. Nobody was going to shut him up or rein him in. He was in the White House with his 4-year old son on his shoulders, on the stage of a Conservative Political Action Conference rally, promoting his cost-cutting crusade by waving a chain saw. He and his Department of Government Efficiency deputies spread chaos through Washington, locking staffers out of computer systems, gaining access to personal data on private citizens and identifying government employees they deemed expendable.At first, President Trump appeared to endorse every cost-cutting move by his unorthodox adviser, declaring on social media that he and his cabinet were “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.” But Mr. Musk then violated the cardinal rule of Trumpland by daring to criticize the president’s policies and appointees — not just once or twice, but with remarkable consistency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Under Trump and Musk, billionaires wield unprecedented influence over US national security

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      Just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its New Glenn rocket, named for John Glenn, the Mercury astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth. Around 2am on 16 January, the 30-story rocket powered by seven engines blasted off into the Florida night from Cape Canaveral’s historic launch complex 36, which first served as a Nasa launch site in 1962.The flight’s end was marred by a failure to bring the booster rocket back for further use, but the successful launch and orbit still marked a watershed moment for Blue Origin in its bid to compete with SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, for dominance over American spy satellite operations. During the Trump administration, it is likely that both companies will play significant roles in placing spy satellites into Earth orbit, which could mean that the United States intelligence community will be beholden to both Bezos and Musk to handle the single most complex and expensive endeavor in modern espionage.In fact, Musk and Bezos are in a position during the Trump administration to personally exert significant influence over the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the rest of the US national security apparatus. The two pro-Trump billionaires have already been awarded massive contracts with the US intelligence community, including some that predate Trump’s first term in office.The emergence of Musk, Bezos and a handful of other pro-Trump billionaires as key players in US intelligence marks a radical change in US spy operations, which have traditionally been controlled by career government officials working closely with a few longstanding defense and intelligence contractors, giant corporations such as Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman that are adept at lobbying both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But with Musk, Bezos and other pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures gaining an edge through their personal ties to Trump, civil servants in the intelligence community may be reluctant to deny them ever-larger contracts, especially since Trump has already fired several inspectors general who investigated Musk’s businesses in other areas of the government.Anticipating big rewards, Musk is reportedly joining forces with other pro-Trump billionaires to try to carve up the defense and intelligence business. SpaceX is working with Palantir, a hi-tech data analytics intelligence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent rightwing figures in Silicon Valley; Anduril, a new defense contractor founded by 32-year-old pro-Trump tech bro Palmer Luckey; and several other Silicon Valley firms to form a consortium geared towards loosening the grip of the defense industry’s traditional players.Tech leaders eager to get into intelligence contracting have long complained that the business has become so consolidated around a few big players that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to compete, leading to a lack of innovation. “Consolidation bred conformity,” argued Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, in a widely read public memo, The Defense Reformation.Swapping one oligarchy for anotherIt is hard to separate Silicon Valley’s calls for breaking up the oligarchy now controlling the defense and intelligence business from the eagerness of pro-Trump tech bros to grab as much power and cash as possible while creating a new oligarchy of their own.“The idea of overturning the contracting process did intrigue me, but now, under Trump, I think it is just about greed,” observed Greg Treverton, a former director of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s top analytical arm. “Now, with Trump, it is mostly about money and connections.”In the eyes of their critics, tech entrepreneurs offer a simplistic, black-and-white picture of the defense and intelligence business in which Silicon Valley conveniently has all the answers.“Beware the instant expert,” said Peter Singer, a defense analyst at the New America Foundation. “It’s like they are saying ‘I watched a YouTube video and now I know everything.’ They have this narrative that only Silicon Valley can drive innovation.”Elon Musk, satellite spymasterAs he eagerly slashes and burns through the ranks of federal employees with his Doge apparatus, Musk has emerged as the most powerful and polarizing figure in the Trump administration. But what is less well known is that Musk has also gained an influential role in the US intelligence community despite never having served inside the spy world.Musk’s SpaceX has already become one of the main rocket contractors launching American spy satellites and is seeking to overcome the edge held by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the traditional giant in the niche. In addition, Starlink, Musk’s commercial satellite communication network, is playing a critical role in US foreign policy, providing internet service in remote regions of the world including in Ukraine, where it operates a communications network for the Ukrainian army. Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war has placed Musk squarely in the middle of the dispute between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Meanwhile, questions about whether Musk is assuming a dual role as both a player in Trump’s national security policymaking and a major contractor grew after he received a private briefing at the Pentagon on 21 March and visited the CIA headquarters 10 days later.SpaceX has a head start over Blue Origin in the spy satellite business, and Musk has a big lead over Bezos in Trump world. But Blue Origin and Bezos are working hard to catch up in both.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBezos seeks to add to classified cloud contractDuring his first term, Trump repeatedly attacked Bezos over negative stories that were published in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, and as revenge threatened Amazon’s business dealings with the US Postal Service. Since the 2024 election, though, Bezos has turned himself into a Trump booster, lavishing praise and large donations on the president while also working to transform the Washington Post’s opinion page, which he says should focus on “personal liberties and free markets”.Bezos’s move into an alliance with Trump has put him in a position to expand his reach into the spy satellite business while also protecting the large stake he already holds in other aspects of intelligence. The billionaire, the second-richest person in the world after Musk, has been involved in the spy world for more than a decade through Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, which Bezos founded and where he remains executive chair. Amazon Web Services has managed the CIA’s classified cloud since it won a $600m contract with the spy agency in 2013, and dramatically expanded its intelligence role when it was awarded a $10bn contract to manage the NSA’s classified cloud in 2022 through a program code-named “Wild and Stormy”.Palmer Luckey and Silicon Valley’s clique of young defense contractorsPlenty of other Silicon Valley billionaires are also seeking to crowd into Washington alongside Musk and Bezos. Palantir’s Thiel is a mentor of the vice-president, JD Vance, and his firm has a longstanding relationship with the intelligence community that is likely to expand under Trump. The CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel, was one of the early backers of Palantir after its 2003 founding, and the company has had a major role in the development of data integration and data analytics systems for the intelligence community. Palantir is now seeking a broader role in developing AI for both the Pentagon and the intelligence community.Luckey, who made his name as a virtual reality entrepreneur by founding Oculus, has become a prominent new face at the intersection of Trump world and national security. Luckey’s Anduril now has a contract with the US army to develop battlefield virtual reality headsets, which would allow data to be sent directly to soldiers while also allowing them to control unmanned drones and other weapons. In addition, Anduril won a $642m contract with the Marine Corps to develop countermeasures against small drones in March. Luckey first supported Trump in 2016, when that was an unpopular position in Silicon Valley, but now that Trump is back, he has said that he’s on an “I told you so tour”, trumpeting his America-first political views.Luckey said in a recent interview: “I don’t think the United States needs to be the world police. It needs to be the world’s gun store.”Google once committed to not building artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance in a watershed moment of divorcing tech from the defense and intelligence industry. Earlier this year, though, the company scrapped that pledge. The campaign by the tech bros to win bigger roles for themselves in defense and intelligence represents a return to Silicon Valley’s roots. Hi-tech originally grew in northern California because of its early connections to the military and defense industrial base in the region, observed Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian at the University of Washington.“Silicon Valley has always been in the business of war,” O’Mara said. More

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      SpaceX Scrubs Launch of NASA SPHEREx and PUNCH Missions

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      The spacecraft, SPHEREx and PUNCH, had been expected to launch on a SpaceX rocket on Saturday.Two NASA missions will have to wait longer for a launch aboard a single rocket. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home.SpaceX on Saturday night announced on the website X around two hours before the scheduled launch time of 10:09 p.m. Eastern that it needed to continue checking the Falcon 9 rocket that was to lift the vehicles to orbit.The company said it would announce the next launch attempt when it was possible to do so from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a hundred colors that are invisible to the human eye. Accompanying the telescope is a suite of satellites known collectively as PUNCH, which will study the sun’s outer atmosphere and solar wind.What is SPHEREx?SPHEREx is short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The mouthful of a name is fitting for the vastness of its goal: to survey the entire sky in 102 colors, or wavelengths, of infrared light.The space telescope, which looks like a giant megaphone, will record around 600 images each day, capturing light from millions of stars in our cosmic backyard and even more galaxies beyond it. Using a technique called spectroscopy, SPHEREx will separate the light into different wavelengths, like a glass prism splitting white light into a rainbow of colors. The color spectrum of an object in space reveals information about its chemical makeup and distance from Earth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Federal Grant Program Opens Door to Elon Musk’s Starlink

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      The Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would overhaul a $42 billion federal grant program aimed at expanding high-speed internet to the nation, including easing some rules that could benefit Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink.The program will be revamped to “take a tech-neutral approach” in its distribution of funds to states, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement. The program’s rules, which were created during the Biden administration, previously favored broadband lines made of fiber-optic cables attached to homes.“The department is ripping out the Biden administration’s pointless requirements,” Mr. Lutnick said. The Commerce Department will also remove regulatory and other barriers that slow down construction and connection to households, he added.Congress created the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program in 2021 to extend broadband to the most remote areas of the nation. The Commerce Department came up with standards and rules for states and territories applying for the funds — including the preference for fiber-optic broadband, which provides the fastest internet service speeds.Mr. Musk, who is a close adviser to President Trump and helping to lead a government efficiency initiative, is chief executive of SpaceX, the rocket company that makes Starlink. Starlink uses low-altitude satellites to beam internet service to dishes anywhere on the planet and then to devices. It serves nearly five million subscribers worldwide and was used by emergency responders late last year in North Carolina when communications networks shut down after a hurricane.The Commerce Department’s internet program has not yet disbursed any funds, and Republicans have used it as an example of a program that was slowed down by red tape.Some have accused the Biden administration of unfairly blocking Starlink from the grants and say the satellite service can immediately serve some of the most remote areas of the nation.In 2023, the Federal Communications Commission rejected Starlink’s application for almost $900 million in subsidies in a separate rural broadband program, saying the company failed to show it could meet service requirements for the funding.Brendan Carr, then a Republican F.C.C. commissioner and now chairman of the agency, opposed that decision and said the action had put the F.C.C. on a “growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses.”Mr. Musk’s business interests — which also include the electric-car maker Tesla and the social media company X — have prompted concerns about potential conflicts of interest as he makes important decisions in Washington.On Wednesday, some public interest groups expressed concern that Mr. Lutnick’s plans to change the broadband program could directly benefit Mr. Musk.“Fiber broadband is widely understood to be better than other internet options — like Starlink’s satellites — because it delivers significantly faster speeds,” said Drew Garner, a director of policy engagement for the nonprofit Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for details on the plan. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      White House to overhaul $42.5bn Biden-era internet plan – probably to Elon Musk’s advantage

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      The Trump administration is preparing to overhaul a $42.5bn Biden-era program designed to connect tens of millions of rural Americans to reliable and affordable high-speed internet, in a move that is expected to benefit billionaire Elon Musk.Howard Lutnick, the commerce department secretary who has oversight of the federal program, recently told senior officials inside the department that he wants to make significant changes to the federal program, sources with knowledge of the matter told the Guardian.Instead of promoting an expensive buildout of fiber optic networks – as the Biden administration sought to do – Lutnick has said he wants states to choose the internet technology that would be low cost for taxpayers.That, experts agree, would favor satellite companies like Musk’s Starlink. Musk, whose company owns about 62% of all operating satellites, has not hidden his disdain for Biden-era program, telling voters last year that he believed it should be brought down to “zero”.Sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.Experts generally agree that using satellite services costs less to connect difficult-to-reach homes than fiber. But fiber also provides a more reliable, faster and less expensive option for consumers.Any change to the program could face substantial pushback from states and Congress, including Republican senators who have previously sought assurances from administration officials that the federal program, which is expected to generate billions of dollars in long-term economic growth across some of the poorest states in the US, would largely be left alone.The so-called Bead program (which stands for “Broadband Equity Access and Deployment”) was passed with bipartisan support in 2021 and aimed to connect 25 million Americans to high-speed internet. Under the Biden plan, states were left to make their own plans, request federal funding and hold competitive bids for internet service providers that would build the network. Given different choices of how to connect homes to high-speed internet, the Biden administration said it wanted states to build fiber optic networks, which are expensive to set up but are considered reliable and can offer affordable rates to consumers. In cases where fiber optic networks were too expensive to build, states could opt for cheaper options, like using satellite.“I don’t think there is doubt that Bead will continue,” said Blair Levin, policy advisor to New Street Research, a telecommunications and technology analysis firm. “What is in doubt is whether people get a long-term solution or something that is definitely good for Elon Musk.”Lutnick has told commerce officials that he wants Bead to be “tech neutral”, which means not favoring one technology over another. It is unclear whether Lutnick would try to force states to choose satellite service over others.Such changes – which would probably be challenged by individual states – would radically alter a program that has faced some criticism but has generally been embraced by both Republican and Democratic governors across the US, who have been expecting to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. The funds would provide an economic lifeline that would connect an estimated 56m household in mostly rural communities who are unserved or underserved to high-speed internet. It is estimated that the program, as it stands now, would generate at least 380,000 new jobs and fuel more than $3tn in economic growth.The commerce department did not respond to a request for comment.“The driving force behind Bead was parity. Can you get internet service in rural Wyoming what you can get in suburban Denver?” said one analyst who requested anonymity because they are providing advice to some states on the issue. “Fiber is utterly critical. If the internet is the most important infrastructure asset a state has, and you are using satellite, then it means you are not building something in your state. It can be turned on and off by the satellite provider.”Any dramatic change to the federal program also raises legal questions. States have spent years planning for Bead, including holding competitive bids for companies to build fiber networks. It is unclear whether the commerce department can force these states to restart their planning from scratch. The overriding criticism of the Biden program is that the bureaucracy took too long, and that not a single household has yet been connected to high-speed internet yet. The Trump administration might argue that states may as well start again to benefit taxpayers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor states like Louisiana, which was poised to receive $1.355bn under the Biden program and was the first state to get full approval for its plan, any change could upend estimates that the fiber optic build-out would drive $2bn to $3bn in economic growth for the state and between 8,000 and 10,000 new jobs. Planned investments, like a $10bn AI center that is poised to be built by Meta in Richland parish, a poor farming region in the north-east corner of the state, would depend on fiber optic connections. In a recent letter to Lutnick, the Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, said the state would be ready to break ground on its fiber optic network within the first 100 days of the administration.The top Louisiana official working on the program, Veneeth Iyengar, has said about 95% of the state’s funds will be used to build fiber, and the remaining 5% will be used for cable, fixed wireless and satellite.Trump administration officials have balked at the program’s price tag.Musk made his views about the program clear at a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh last October, before the election. When he was asked about what he would do to help make the government more efficient, Musk immediately raised Bead as an example of a program he would cut.“I would say that program should be zero,” he quipped at the time, while also suggesting that his own satellite company, Starlink, could provide internet connectivity to rural homes at a fraction of the connectivity cost.Starlink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Some Republican senators asked Lutnick about his views on Bead during his confirmation hearing, but he offered no promises. When Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska asked Lutnick whether he could assure him that commerce would not rely on Starlink “as a solution to all of our problems”, Lutnick declined to answer, saying only that he would work to pursue the “most efficient and effective solutions for Alaskans”.Do you have a tip on this story? Please message us on Signal at +1 646 886 8761 More