Mumbo-jumbo to dodge the issue, which is restrictions on Starshield military capabilities, not Ukrainians’ use of Starlink commercial services.
In my post earlier today on how the Trump administration is seeking to shift blame to Elon Musk for the restrictions placed on Ukraine’s access to the Starshield satellite system (the military application of Starlink, which Musk’s SpaceX developed and provides to the U.S. government), I noted that Trump officials had come up with a script in statements to the media, stressing “terms of use”:
With all the subtlety of a thunderclap, then, administration officials are trying to shift the blame onto Musk by framing the imposition of restrictions as a case of Musk acting unilaterally because Ukraine violated the contractual “terms of use,” as Hegseth has started putting it.
This is the administration’s way of contending both that (a) Musk, not President Trump and the Pentagon, is responsible for the restrictions that Russia exploited to conduct massive strikes on civilian infrastructure that killed dozens of people and left hundreds of thousands without power; and (b) it’s really Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, not Musk, who is chiefly to blame because somehow — the administration isn’t saying how — Ukraine violated the “terms of use” (or terms of service) for Starshield.
The phrase “terms of use” is getting a workout in this “Gee, we at the government don’t know anything about this dispute between Musk’s company and another country” storyline. Trump’s NATO ambassador, Matt Whitaker, invoked it on Fox News, insisting:
They are a private company. Obviously, they have terms of use that are applied to all their customers, including the Ukrainians. I think it is more of a dispute along those lines than anybody in this administration trying to change how Starshield or Starlink is used.
Whitaker said he was consciously echoing Secretary of State Rubio’s version of events. Reuters was the first to report that the Starshield restrictions were ordered from the White House, matching up with Musk’s own assertion that the relevant decisions are made by the Defense Department and, ultimately, the president. The wire service reports that Rubio stressed that decisions regarding Starlink were up to SpaceX and Musk, not the White House.
Of course, as Rubio and Whitaker have to know, the dispute here is not about Starlink, the publicly available commercial satellite service, and whether it is being used by Ukrainians for military purposes against Starlink’s terms of use. The controversy involves Starshield, the military application, for which SpaceX’s contract is with the U.S. government, not Ukraine (which has gotten Starshield intel through the U.S.). That is why Musk could confidently say that the government makes these decisions (even if it’s true, as it may well be, that Musk supported the decision to restrict the service).
Moreover, as I reiterated earlier today, incorporating prior posts about the Trump administration’s dispute with Anthropic, Trump and Hegseth have been emphatic that when the government contracts with a private service provider, it does not accept terms-of-use restrictions on services that have military and intelligence applications.
The Pentagon is Starshield’s most lucrative account, with the U.S. government having spent at least tens of millions of dollars on it (some reporting says the government has spent $6 billion on SpaceX services, but public reporting on payments has not been clearly broken down among Starlink, Starshield, and other applications). In my opinion, it’s obvious that the administration gave Musk the green light to impose the restrictions, and in today’s earlier post I hypothesized that this was done at Russia’s request. Whatever you may think of that theory, to buy the administration’s terms-of-use version of events, you’d have to believe that the U.S. government is not the relevant customer and that — despite the close connection of the administration to Musk, and despite the amount of money the government has paid and continues to pay SpaceX — the Trump administration doesn’t know what happened here and hasn’t been interested enough to demand an explanation from its contractor.