Alarming.

In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.

Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.

Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?

When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.

How convenient for Musk that Trump fired the Defense Department IG.

The stakes around this question are extremely high. As the Times reported, concerns about Musk and national security have intensified so much that even some employees at SpaceX share them. With SpaceX receiving billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon and NASA, Musk has access to classified information, including about U.S. military technology, according to the Times.

As such, Musk—who has top-secret security clearance at SpaceX—is supposed to be subject to continuous vetting by the government. That requires him to report certain details of his private life and travel abroad, enabling the government to gauge whether he’s fit to have access to that classified info.

Yet Musk has failed to meet these reporting requirements since at least 2021, the Times reported, noting that Musk and his team haven’t provided the government with “some details of his travel” and “some of his meetings with foreign leaders.” The paper reported that SpaceX employees who are supposed to ensure adherence to these rules have complained to the IG about Musk’s and SpaceX’s lax compliance.

“Lax compliance” is one way to describe it. Another would be “criminal refusal.”

Meanwhile, back in October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has had numerous conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This included ones in which Putin asked Musk to use his technology to do Russia geopolitical favors, such requesting that Musk “avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”

So Musk is doing “favors” for Putin and Xi at the expense of Taiwan and Ukraine to name only two.

Musk doesn’t believe he should deign to submit to such scrutiny. When the news broke in December that he was the subject of these reviews, he raged that “deep state traitors are coming after me.” In short, when Musk talks about destroying the “deep state,” what he really means (among other things) is that he hopes to destroy any and all mechanisms of transparency and accountability that might restrain him. This, even as he enjoys billions in federal contracts and has been empowered by Trump to reshape the U.S. state to an extraordinarily radical degree, despite not being elected or appointed to a real government position.

All of this is happening in plain sight but it seems nobody can stop it.