NASA might be Elon Musk’s federal cost-cutting agency’s next target. NASA’s acting administrator, Janet Petro, confirmed Wednesday that the DOGE team will review the space agency’s payments, Bloomberg reported.
“So we are a federal agency; we are going to have DOGE come,” Petro told reporters. “They are going to look — similarly to what they’ve done at other agencies — at our payments.” She added that the agency will maintain its stringent “conflicts of interest policies” in preparation for DOGE representatives storming NASA. “Any employee or any person that’s coming in, we will check out their conflict of interest, make sure they don’t have any conflicts of interest with any of the companies that we work with,” Petro said.
The DOGE boss’ company, SpaceX, is one of NASA’s biggest contractors. Among its projects, SpaceX has also been contracted to create a vehicle to land humans on the surface of the moon — all part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Despite Musk’s $14.5 billion worth of contracts, the SpaceX CEO has often criticized NASA, calling the program “extremely inefficient” and its missions to the moon “a distraction” from his own interests in colonizing Mars. Read more at Bloomberg.