Elon Musk's regulatory troubles have begun to melt away in Trump's second term

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  and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump  who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to  — 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  against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a  of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has  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 온라인카지노사이트 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  of  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 .

Some agencies have also helped Musk’s businesses by relaxing written regulations. Last month, the Transportation Department  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, , despite impacts on the environment and .

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  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 , consumer protection actions against  and lawsuits against .

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  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  and for . Reuters reported last month that SpaceX is a front-runner to help build  missile defense shield, a system  aimed at the country.

One regulatory matter involving Tesla ended on Trump’s first full day back in office. Trump signed  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  on a list . (The audits are not entirely random; the office said it chose contractors  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  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  shortly after the dismissal. The complaint alleged that SpaceX discriminated against refugees in hiring, a claim that . 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 온라인카지노사이트 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  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  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 NLRB did not respond to a request for comment on why it changed course.

SpaceX has , saying they caused a disruption and violated several corporate policies.

Tom Moline, one of the fired SpaceX employees, said in an interview that he is concerned about new conflicts of interest at the NLRB.

“They’re meant to be independent from both workers and employers,” he said.

“Anyone could see that there’s conflicts of interest there, in my opinion,” he added. “We’ve seen DOGE employees planting themselves at all these federal agencies.” The NLRB is one of the many offices where DOGE has been active. A security specialist has alleged that DOGE , a claim the labor board has denied.

The decisions to drop the regulatory actions  of experts last year who said Musk’s companies would likely benefit under Trump’s regulators, and the changed landscape means that when Musk turns his attention back to his tech companies, he’ll operate with fewer constraints than before. Musk said  on April 22 that his time commitment to DOGE would “drop significantly” starting in May as he allocated more of his time to Tesla.

Cary Coglianese, a law professor and the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Regulation, said Musk is not alone among business executives who are benefiting from Trump’s regulators.

“This is an administration that’s slowing down enforcement processes across the board. So, is he getting special treatment? Or is he getting just the kind of relaxed regulatory scrutiny that any business might enjoy under the Trump administration? That’s a hard question to answer,” he said.

But he added that the pattern is suspicious if it holds, and he said Musk hasn’t navigated ethical questions the way past White House advisers have. Musk has kept his private sector roles, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, while serving as a “special government employee.” That’s a category of temporary federal worker that includes many more people than just Musk, although unlike with others, there’s no evidence that Musk  outlining the steps he’s taken to avoid conflicts of interest.

“As a citizen, I have to say it looks like there might be some special treatment, and as a citizen, I should probably be worried about even the appearance of special treatment,” Coglianese said.

“We should hold those who are having influence over government policy to very high standards, and as long as he has ownership stake and managerial control of companies that are being investigated by or benefiting from the work of government agencies, it certainly is, if nothing else, the appearance of illegitimacy,” he said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a : “For concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.”

Beyond those three cases, there are more lawsuits and investigations where the Trump administration has neither dismissed the matter nor taken recent action on it, and  say they fear those matters will go dormant even while not technically closed. And there are dozens of lawsuits and investigations where Trump has fired the people who were running them, making it more likely those probes will go into hibernation.

Musk and his companies faced dozens of investigations and lawsuits by federal agencies as of January, according to research by Democrats on the . In a report last month, they estimated that Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential liability if all the investigations and lawsuits resulted in enforcement, not including intangible costs such as being forced to change labor practices.

“The truth is that the breathtaking scope and scale of benefits Mr. Musk is gaining from his present position may never be known, and that is by design,” the Democratic researchers said in their report.

Many of the cases “could quietly disappear,” the report said, with investigations potentially “dismissed without explanation, deferred indefinitely, or resolved in any number of ways that prioritize Mr. Musk’s private interests over that of public accountability.”

Of the 11 federal agencies that Senate Democratic researchers identified as investigating Musk’s companies as of January, most of them  have suffered cutbacks from Musk’s DOGE. Trump’s budget blueprint released earlier this month could .

In January, Trump  of the Agriculture Department, Phyllis Fong. One of the investigations her office had been working on was a probe of Neuralink, Musk’s brain science startup, for carrying out experiments in ways that allegedly caused suffering and unnecessary death for animals, . It’s unclear if that investigation is ongoing, and the USDA IG’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Fong also did not respond to a request for comment.

Neuralink  it’s “committed to working with animals in the most humane and ethical way possible.” The startup did not respond to a request for comment on Fong’s firing.

Trump and Musk’s DOGE have attempted  the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is charged with protecting Americans from financial fraud. The bureau has received more than 100 complaints about Tesla over the past year, mostly related to vehicle leases or loans offered or issued by Tesla, and it still had about 30 open or unresolved complaints about Tesla as of last week, according to . The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on what happens to those complaints now. A federal appeals court  Trump’s CFPB mass firings for now.

Musk has called for ending the CFPB entirely,  on X: “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

Trump has attempted to remove two Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which polices discrimination in hiring. It’s unclear whether those moves could disrupt a lawsuit filed by the EEOC in 2023 against Tesla over alleged racial harassment at a factory in Fremont, California. A hearing in that lawsuit is scheduled for June, and Trump’s authority to fire EEOC commissioners without cause is also .

An EEOC spokesperson declined to comment on whether there were any settlement talks.

Trump has appointed new leadership to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it’s unclear what changes they may make to matters involving Musk’s companies. The SEC  in January, six days before Biden left office, alleging that he failed to disclose in 2022 that he had bought up more than 5% of Twitter stock and therefore kept prices “artificially low,” according to the SEC. Musk is  a response to the lawsuit in court in June.

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment on whether there were any settlement talks.

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