Trump Lied: Taxpayers Paid For Those Dodgy DOGE Bro Starlink Terminals Duct-Taped To The White House Roof

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's dodgy DOGE bros illegally stole vast troves of government datasets. Some of these random, unqualified assholes stole data simply using USB drives. But you might recall how many of the DOGE bros had also installed Starlink terminals duct-taped to the White House roof (and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) to engage in all sorts of data transfers we don't have answers for (yet).

At the time, Trump and Musk insisted that these Starlink terminals were donated out of the kindness of Elon Musk's heart. Though new reporting from the Washington Post indicates that this was somehow also a lie, and that taxpayers have been footing the bill the entire time:

...contracting records reveal that the Trump administration has been spending taxpayers' dollars since last year to install and service Starlink equipment at the White House. In four contract awards from March 2025 to June this year, the government has agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million to SpaceX for services provided to the White House Communications Agency, a military unit that sets up secure communications for the president, vice president and other officials."

So, three payments to Musk Corp totalling $502,000 were reported last week by the legal advocacy group Democracy Defenders Fund. A fourth contract worth $686,000 was revealed by the Post. In other words, you personally paid Elon Musk to compromise White House IT infrastructure and likely offload oodles of your personal data to a bunch of random Musk-linked assholes.

Last year, the Secret Service brushed aside security concerns when asked about it by the Washington Post, claiming that slow Starlink service was just improving internet access:"

We were aware of DOGE's intentions to improve internet access on the campus and did not consider this matter a security incident or security breach."

But there's simply no valid reason you'd need to suddenly install Elon Musk's slower Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite connections to a White House IT system rife with multi-gigabit fiber and gigabit Wi-Fi. Unless, of course, you're interested in engaging in activity that can't be monitored, whether that's of the ordinary corruption communication variety or wholesale data theft.

Last week, a security firm also noted how multiple White House employees have installed dodgy Russian-linked proxy software on their computers, allowing outside access to sensitive White House IT systems for far less than a cup of coffee. And that's of course on top of all the other Trump-related IT security scandals, including the massive Salt Typhoon hack Trump has helped scuttle investigations of, the CEO of NVIDIA having an affair with a Chinese spy, and Trump admin officials endlessly having their phones hacked. And you have to assume we're only seeing a tiny fraction of it.

There's a certain irony that all of this dodgy shit was going on at the same time that a bipartisan array of lawmakers (and much of the press) was obsessed with TikTok being the biggest cybersecurity threat of the age. Something they fixed" by offloading TikTok to Trump's billionaire friends.

It bears repeating: U.S. government IT infrastructure should probably be considered completely compromised by foreign actors, and will require a total audit and rebuild that will be going on long after Trump is dead. You will, of course, also be footing the bill for that. With much of that money going to tech companies that personally helped bring Trump to power in the first place.