Elon Musk’s unprecedented role in the White House now includes having the presidential residence and its adjacent offices connected to SpaceX’s Starlink service, according to a report the New York Times published Monday night.
The story by Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Eileen Sullivan and Ryan Mac suggests that tourists should not expect to glimpse any Starlink dishes on the roof of the White House.
Instead, the NYT piece says broadband from that constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit is “routed through a White House data center, with existing fiber cables, miles from the complex.”
Trump administration officials claimed that “some areas of the property could not get cell service,” according to the Times, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the Starlink project as intended “to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex.”
Neither of those explanations makes sense. Starlink’s direct-to-cellular service would not require an extra deployment to cover the White House grounds and, more important, only provides text messaging. And if a wireless network isn’t delivering adequate coverage, the fix is to install better wireless routers or mesh nodes instead of plugging a different connection into the same underperforming local-network gear.
The latest Starlink Dish V4 and Router Gen 3 equipment (Credit: Brian Westover)
The White House itself should not be hurting for broadband, as the phrase “existing fiber cables” suggests. Nor should it lack for wireless signal strength; the FCC’s broadband map shows 100% coverage of the campus and nearby blocks from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and even Boost Mobile’s 5G-only network.
“I was just in the East Wing in December, and had no trouble with mobile service,” emailed Waldo Jaquith, a longtime government technologist who was a senior advisor at the General Services Administration under President Biden.
Yet the Times report recounts a SpaceX and X engineer named Chris Stanley venturing onto the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House, to investigate setting up Starlink there–where a uniformed Secret Service officer rushed to investigate the intrusion.
The story describes this unique setup as a donation from Starlink that White House ethics lawyers cleared. It does not clarify whether this added connectivity provides the same security as existing wired broadband; security researcher Jake Williams told the Times that this “introduces another attack point.”
Starlink should not be able to snoop on the details of White House staffers’ usage, thanks to nearly-universal encryption of web site and app traffic. But senior government officials ought to regard themselves as highly targeted and of exceptional interest to nation-state attackers such as the Chinese operatives that attempted to compromise Trump’s phone last summer.
Jaquith, who called the Starlink arrangement “a huge security exposure” in a Bluesky post Monday, said he would be leery of using Wi-Fi in general around the White House: “Everybody should be using Ethernet to the greatest extent possible.”
Could Starlink Actually Be Useful at the White House?
In terms of bandwidth alone, Starlink’s own site suggests the service won’t perform well at this location. Searches for service availability at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and eight nearby addresses on private property all advised that an order for service would come with the $100 “congestion charge” the service began tacking onto some bills last September.
Musk himself has historically described Starlink as only suited for service outside of urban areas.
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“Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble reaching,” he said at a satellite-industry conference in March of 2020. “We can’t do a lot of customers in L.A. because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough.”
He reiterated that at MWC Barcelona in July of 2021, saying Starlink is “really meant for sparsely populated regions.”
Starlink now reaches RVs, yachts and airliners, but its land-based customer base still mostly resides far from cities: A survey conducted by the research firm Recon Analytics last year found that 85% of Starlink subscribers lived in rural areas. PCMag’s own Starlink testing location in rural Idaho does experience satisfactory performance.
But things are different for Musk now that his work as the unelected head of the Trump administration’s government-disruption “DOGE” project has given him the keys to multiple government agencies, some of which he is illegally attempting to destroy.
The FAA is reportedly considering using Starlink to connect some air-traffic-control facilities despite having already signed a $2 billion contract with Verizon to upgrade its connectivity. And the National Telecommunications and Information Administration appears to be considering handing much more of the government’s $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program’s subsidies over to Starlink.
BEAD’s outgoing director Evan Feinman denounced that idea in an email to his former colleagues that Politico reported Sunday: “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”
5 Things to Know About Starlink Satellite Internet
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About Rob Pegoraro
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