Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s regulatory problems have started to fade into the past.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.
In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.
And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.
Jon Michaels, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on administrative law, said he wouldn’t be surprised if federal agencies are slow-walking the 40-plus ongoing matters involving Musk’s companies.
“You’re not just going against Elon Musk. You’re going against Elon Musk who’s puppeteering large swaths of the federal government,” he said, referring to Musk’s sweeping role as a White House adviser for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
He added that some individual federal workers may fear for their safety due to Musk’s documented pattern of singling out people for criticism on his massive social media platform even if they’re largely unknown.
And while other Republican presidents have also loosened environmental rules or labor law enforcement, Michaels said this time is different because of Musk’s personal involvement in taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
“The administrative state as we traditionally understand it will be incapacitated,” he said.
The moves may help Musk’s companies avoid potential fines for alleged violations of federal law. At stake is more than $2 billion in potential liability, plus workplace changes that Musk could have to make if he loses those regulatory fights, according to a recent report by Senate Democrats.
Some agencies have also helped Musk’s businesses by relaxing written regulations. Last month, the Transportation Department lowered the threshold for self-driving car companies including Tesla to report safety incidents, and this week, the Federal Aviation Administration granted permission for SpaceX to perform 25 launches per year of its massive Starship, a fivefold increase, despite impacts on the environment and air travel.
Regulators’ new hands-off approach is one of the most tangible rewards for Musk and potentially other business executives after many of them threw their support behind Trump’s campaign last year to regain the White House. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, spent around $290 million to help Trump and fellow Republicans and has served as a White House adviser to Trump since January. Musk has said he plans to largely return to the tech world over the next few weeks.
Musk isn’t the only beneficiary of Trump’s actions. The Trump administration has also dropped regulatory matters against other corporations, including a Clean Air Act case against a Louisiana rubber factory, consumer protection actions against financial services companies and lawsuits against cryptocurrency firms.
Trump has also moved forward with action that Musk has directly lobbied against, like tariffs, which would have potentially negative impacts on his businesses.
Asked for comment about the Trump administration’s handling of Musk-related regulatory matters, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement: “All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements.”
Musk and Musk’s companies did not respond to requests for comment on the handling of regulatory matters involving his business empire. Musk’s allies have argued since 2023 or earlier that he had been unfairly targeted for regulatory actions by the Biden administration, even though Musk’s companies maintained and won large government contracts under President Joe Biden.
The changing regulatory environment comes as Musk stands to benefit in other ways from the new administration, including potentially new or expanded contracts for his satellite internet service Starlink and for his rocket service SpaceX. Reuters reported last month that SpaceX is a front-runner to help build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, a system to stop hostile missiles aimed at the country.
One regulatory matter involving Tesla ended on Trump’s first full day back in office. Trump signed an executive order Jan. 21 halting the operations of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, an agency within the Labor Department that reviewed government contractors to ensure they followed civil rights laws. Tesla was among 2,000 contractors on a list for scheduled audits. (The audits are not entirely random; the office said it chose contractors based on several criteria including employee head count.) Without mentioning Tesla in particular, Trump said such audits diminished the importance of individual merit in hiring. The new head of the office, named on March 24, is a lawyer who previously represented SpaceX in a labor dispute.
On Feb. 24, an administrative complaint filed against SpaceX in 2023, during the Biden administration, was dismissed by the Department of Justice, according to a filing in federal court shortly after the dismissal. The complaint alleged that SpaceX discriminated against refugees in hiring, a claim that SpaceX denied. SpaceX had countersued, saying the DOJ’s system of administrative law judges violated the Constitution. SpaceX agreed to drop its countersuit Feb. 28.
In a statement to NBC News, Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the DOJ dismissed the case due to multiple factors including the SpaceX countersuit.
“The Biden Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division initiated this action and SpaceX won an injunction to stop the ongoing proceeding. Based on a review of all of the factors, including the pending injunction and constitutional challenge to the original proceeding, the Civil Rights Division made the decision that the most appropriate course of action was to dismiss the complaint,” Dhillon said.
Musk had long called the DOJ’s case political, and he said SpaceX had received conflicting guidance from other federal regulators about hiring nonpermanent residents.
A third case involves the National Labor Relations Board and has been pending since 2022, when SpaceX says it fired several employees for sending an open letter to co-workers about working conditions. The NLRB, newly under Trump’s control, said in a court filing on April 23 that it was interested in “potentially settling the legal disputes currently pending between the NLRB and SpaceX” and it asked a federal appeals court to pause its proceedings entirely while discussions continue. On Monday, the appeals court agreed. The NLRB did not respond to a request for comment on why it changed course.
SpaceX has defended firing the employees, saying they caused a disruption and violated several corporate policies.
