Donald Trump

Trump’s trade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn

digital services tax, Donald Trump, European Union, Policy, tariffs / DJ Henderson / May 21, 2025

Trump urged to rethink trade policy to block attacks on digital services.

In sparking his global trade war, Donald Trump seems to have maintained a glaring blind spot when it comes to protecting one of America’s greatest trade advantages: the export of digital services.

Experts have warned that the consequences for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.

In a report released Tuesday, an intelligence firm that tracks global trade risks, Allianz Trade, shared results of a survey of 4,500 firms worldwide, designed “to capture the impact of the escalation of trade tensions.” Amid other key findings, the group warned that the US’s fixation on the country’s trillion-dollar goods deficit risks rocking “the fastest-growing segment of global trade,” America’s “invisible exports” of financial and digital services.

Tracking these exports is challenging, as many services are provided through foreign affiliates, the report noted, but recent estimates “reveal a large digital trade surplus of at least $600 billion for the US, spread across categories like digital advertising, video streaming, cloud platforms, and online payment services.”

According to Allianz Trade, “the scale of this hidden trade is immense.” These “hidden” exports have “far” outpaced “the growth of goods exports over the past two decades, their report said, but because of how these services are delivered, “this trade goes uncounted in traditional statistics.”

If Trump doesn’t “rethink trade policy and narratives” soon to start tracking all this trade more closely, he risks undermining this trade advantage—which Allianz Trade noted “is underpinned by America’s innovative firms and massive data infrastructure”—at a time when he’s in trade talks with most of the world and could be leveraging that advantage.

“US digital exports now represent a significant share of world trade (about 3.6 percent of all global trade, and growing fast),” Allianz Trade reported. “These ‘invisible’ exports boost US trade revenues without filling any container ships, underscoring a new reality: routers and data centers are as strategically important as ports and factories in sustaining US leadership.”

Without a pivot, Trump’s current trade tactics—requiring all countries impacted by reciprocal tariffs to strike a deal before July 8, while acknowledging that there won’t be time to meet with every country—could even threaten US dominance as “the world’s digital content and tech services hub,” Allianz Trade suggested.

US trade partners are already “looking into tariffs or taxes on digital services as a retaliation tool that could cause pain to the US,” the report warned. And other experts agreed that if such countermeasures become permanent fixtures in global trade, it could significantly hurt the US tech industry, perhaps even splintering the Internet, as companies are forced to customize services according to where different users are located.

Jovan Kurbalija, a former diplomat and executive director of the DiploFoundation who has monitored the Internet’s impact on global trade for more than 20 years, warned in an April blog that this could have a “more profound impact” on the US than other retaliatory measures.

“If the escalation of trade tensions moves into the digital realm, it could have far-reaching consequences for Silicon Valley giants and the digital economy worldwide,” Kurbalija wrote.

“The silent war over digital services”

The threat of retaliatory tariffs hitting the digital services industry has loomed large since European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confirmed to the Financial Times last month that she was proactively developing such countermeasures if Trump’s trade talks with the European Union failed.

Those measures could potentially include “a tax on digital advertising revenues that would hit tech groups such as Amazon, Google and Facebook,” the FT reported. But perhaps most alarmingly, they may also include “tariffs on the services trade between the US and the EU.” Unlike the digital sales tax—which could be imposed differently by EU member states to significantly hurt tech giants’ ad revenues in various regions—the tariff would be applied across a single EU-wide market.

Kurbalija suggested that the problem goes beyond the EU.

Trump’s aggressive tariffs on goods have handed “the EU and others both moral and tactical pretexts to fast-track digital taxes” as countermeasures, Kurbalija wrote. He’s also given foreign governments an appealing narrative of “reclaiming revenue from foreign tech ‘free riders,'” Kurbalija wrote, while perhaps accelerating the broader “use of digital service taxes as a diplomatic tool” to “pressure the US into balanced negotiations.”

For tech companies, the taxes risk escalating trade tensions, potentially perpetuating the atmosphere of uncertainty that, Allianz Trade reported, has US firms scrambling to secure reliable, affordable supply chains.

In an op-ed discussing potential harms to US tech firms and startups, the CEO of CareYaya Health Technologies, Neal K. Shah, warned that “tariffs on digital services would directly reduce revenues for American tech companies.”

At the furthest extreme, the “digital trade war threatens to splinter the Internet’s integrated infrastructure,” Kurbalija warned, fragmenting the Internet in a way that could “undermine decades of gradual development of technological interconnectedness.”

Imagine, Shah suggested, that on top of increased hardware costs, tech companies also incurred costs of providing services for “parallel digital universes with incompatible standards.” Users traveling to different locations might find that platforms have “different features, prices, and capabilities,” he said.

“For startups and industry innovators,” Shah predicted, “fragmentation means higher compliance costs, reduced market access, and slower growth.” Such a world also risks ending “the era of globally scalable digital platforms,” decreasing investor interest in tech, and reducing the global GDP “by up to 5 percent over the next decade as digital trade barriers multiply,” Shah said. And if digital services tariffs become a permanent fixture of global trade, Shah suggested that it could, in the long term, undermine American tech dominance, including in fields critical to national security, like artificial intelligence.

“Trump’s tariffs may dominate today’s headlines, but the silent war over digital services will define tomorrow’s economy,” Kurbalija wrote.

Trump’s go-to countermeasure is still tariffs

Trump has responded to threats of digital services taxes with threats of more tariffs, arguing that “only America should be allowed to tax American firms,” Reuters reported. In February, Trump issued a memo calling for research into the best responsive measures to counter threats of digital service taxes, including threatening more tariffs.

It’s worth asking if Trump’s tactics are working the way he intends, if the US plans to keep up the outdated trade strategy. Allianz Trade’s survey found that many US firms—rather than moving their operations into the US, as Trump has demanded—are instead rerouting supply chains through “emerging trade hubs” like Southeast Asia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Latin American countries where tariff rates are currently lower.

Likely even more frustrating to Trump, however, is a finding that 50 percent of US firms surveyed confirmed they are considering increasing investments in China, in response to the US abruptly shifting tariffs tactics. Only 8 percent said they’re considering decreasing Chinese investments.

It’s unclear if tech companies will be adequately shielded by the US threat of tariffs as the potential default countermeasure to digital services taxes or tariffs. Perhaps Trump’s memo will surface more novel tactics that interest the administration. But Allianz Trade suggested that Trump may be stuck in the past with a trade strategy focused too much on goods at a time when the tech industry needs more modern tactics to keep America’s edge in global markets.

“An economy adept at producing globally demanded services—from cloud software to financial engineering—is less reliant on physical supply chains and less vulnerable to commodity swings,” Allianz Trade reported. “The US edge in digital and financial services is not just an anecdote in the trade ledger; it has become a structural advantage.”

How would digital services tariffs even work?

Trump’s trade math so far has been criticized by economists as a “trillion-dollar tariff disappointment” that at times imposed baffling tariff rates that appeared to be generated by chatbots. But part of the trade math moving forward will also likely be deducing if nations threatening digital services taxes or tariffs can actually follow through on those threats.

Bertin Martens, a senior fellow at a European economics-focused think tank called Bruegel, broke down in April how practical it could be for the EU to attack digital platforms, noting, “there is a question of whether such retaliation is even feasible.”

The EU could possibly use a law known as the Anti-Coercion Regulation—which grants officials authority to lob countermeasures when facing “foreign economic coercion”—to impose digital services tariffs.

But “platforms with substantive presence in the EU cannot be the target of trade measures” under that law, Martens noted. That could create a carveout for the biggest tech giants who have operations in the EU, Martens suggested, but only if those operations are deemed “substantive,” a term that the law does not clearly define.

To make that determination, officials would need “detailed information on the locations or nationalities” of all the users that platforms bring together, including buyers, sellers, advertisers and other parties, Martens said.

This makes digital services platforms “particularly difficult to target,” he suggested. And lawmakers could risk backlash if “any arbitrary decision to invoke” the law risks “imposing a tax on EU users without retaliatory effect on the US.”

While tech companies will have to wait for the trade war to play out—likely planning to increase prices, Allianz Trade found, rather than bear the brunt of new costs—Shah suggested that there could be one clear winner if Trump doesn’t reprioritize shielding digital services exports in the way that experts recommend.

“A surprising potential consequence of digital tariffs could be the accelerated development and adoption of open-source technologies,” Shah wrote. “As proprietary digital products and services become subject to cross-border tariffs, open-source alternatives—which can be freely shared, modified, and distributed—may gain significant advantages.”

If costs get too high, Shah suggested that even tech giants might “increasingly turn to open-source solutions that can be locally deployed without triggering tariff thresholds.” Such a shift could potentially “profoundly affect the competitive landscape in areas like cloud infrastructure, AI frameworks, and enterprise software,” Shah wrote.

In that imagined future where open source alternatives rule the world, Shah said that targeting digital imports by tariff systems could become ineffective, “inadvertently driving adoption toward open-source alternatives that generate less economic leverage.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s trade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn Read More »

Report: Terrorists seem to be paying X to generate propaganda with Grok

AI, chatbot, Donald Trump, elon musk, grok, Policy, sanctions, Terrorism, X, xAI / Beth Washington / May 15, 2025

Back in February, Elon Musk skewered the Treasury Department for lacking “basic controls” to stop payments to terrorist organizations, boasting at the Oval Office that “any company” has those controls.

Fast-forward three months, and now Musk’s social media platform X is suspected of taking payments from sanctioned terrorists and providing premium features that make it easier to raise funds and spread propaganda—including through X’s chatbot Grok. Groups seemingly benefiting from X include Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as groups from Syria, Kuwait, and Iran. Some accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, paying to boost their reach while X seemingly looks the other way.

In a report released Thursday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) flagged popular accounts seemingly linked to US-sanctioned terrorists. Some of the accounts bear “ID verified” badges, suggesting that X may be going against its own policies that ban sanctioned terrorists from benefiting from its platform.

Even more troublingly, “several made use of revenue-generating features offered by X, including a button for tips,” the TTP reported.

On X, Premium subscribers pay $8 monthly or $84 annually, and Premium+ subscribers pay $40 monthly or $395 annually. Verified organizations pay X between $200 and $1,000 monthly, or up to $10,000 annually for access to Premium+. These subscriptions come with perks, allowing suspected terrorist accounts to share longer text and video posts, offer subscribers paid content, create communities, accept gifts, and amplify their propaganda.

Disturbingly, the TTP found that X’s chatbot Grok also appears to be helping to whitewash accounts linked to sanctioned terrorists.

In its report, the TTP noted that an account with the handle “hasmokaled”—which apparently belongs to “a key Hezbollah money exchanger,” Hassan Moukalled—at one point had a blue checkmark with 60,000 followers. While the Treasury Department has sanctioned Moukalled for propping up efforts “to continue to exploit and exacerbate Lebanon’s economic crisis,” clicking the Grok AI profile summary button seems to rely on Moukalled’s own posts and his followers’ impressions of his posts and therefore generated praise.

Report: Terrorists seem to be paying X to generate propaganda with Grok Read More »

GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill

AI, AI regulation, Biz & IT, Donald Trump, GOP, house republicans, machine learning, Policy, republicans, trump administration, US government, White House / 9u50fv / May 13, 2025

The reconciliation bill primarily focuses on cuts to Medicaid access and increased health care fees for millions of Americans. The AI provision appears as an addition to these broader health care changes, potentially limiting debate on the technology’s policy implications.

The move is already inspiring backlash. On Monday, tech safety groups and at least one Democrat criticized the proposal, reports The Hill. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, called the proposal a “giant gift to Big Tech,” while nonprofit groups like the Tech Oversight Project and Consumer Reports warned it would leave consumers unprotected from AI harms like deepfakes and bias.

Big Tech’s White House connections

President Trump has already reversed several Biden-era executive orders on AI safety and risk mitigation. The push to prevent state-level AI regulation represents an escalation in the administration’s industry-friendly approach to AI policy.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, as the AI industry has cultivated close ties with the Trump administration since before the president took office. For example, Tesla CEO Elon Musk serves in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), while entrepreneur David Sacks acts as “AI czar,” and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen reportedly advises the administration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared with Trump in an AI datacenter development plan announcement in January.

By limiting states’ authority over AI regulation, the provision could prevent state governments from using federal funds to develop AI oversight programs or support initiatives that diverge from the administration’s deregulatory stance. This restriction would extend beyond enforcement to potentially affect how states design and fund their own AI governance frameworks.

GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill Read More »

Trump admin to roll back Biden’s AI chip restrictions

AI, AI regulation, Biden adminstration, Biz & IT, Donald Trump, GPUs, Joe Biden, machine learning, NVIDIA, Policy, trump administration / Kelly Newman / May 8, 2025

The changing face of chip export controls

The Biden-era chip restriction framework, which we covered in January, established a three-tiered system for regulating AI chip exports. The first tier included 17 countries, plus Taiwan, that could receive unlimited advanced chips. A second tier of roughly 120 countries faced caps on the number of chips they could import. The administration entirely blocked the third tier, which included China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, from accessing the chips.

Commerce Department officials now say they “didn’t like the tiered system” and considered it “unenforceable,” according to Reuters. While no timeline exists for the new rule, the spokeswoman indicated that officials are still debating the best approach to replace it. The Biden rule was set to take effect on May 15.

Reports suggest the Trump administration might discard the tiered approach in favor of a global licensing system with government-to-government agreements. This could involve direct negotiations with nations like the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia rather than applying broad regional restrictions. However, the Commerce Department spokeswoman indicated that debate about the new approach is still underway, and no timetable has been established for the final rule.

Trump admin to roll back Biden’s AI chip restrictions Read More »

Trump tariffs could make Americans pay $123B more annually for 10 common gadgets

china tariffs, Donald Trump, laptops, Policy, smartphones, Tablets, tariffs, televisions, us-china trade war, video game consoles / 9u50fv / May 7, 2025

Average US price of smartphones, game consoles, and laptops may soon exceed $1,000.

China has finally agreed to open negotiations with the Trump administration as the tech industry warns that tariffs could soon spike Americans’ costs for the 10 most popular consumer technology products by more than $123 billion annually.

On Wednesday, the Chinese Embassy in the US announced on X (formerly Twitter) that “China’s lead on China-US economic and trade affairs,” He Lifeng, will meet with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from May 9 to 12 to open talks. For those talks to go smoothly, China’s Ministry of Commerce told reporters Wednesday, the US must “demonstrate sincerity” and come ready to “correct its wrongdoings,” including facing “the severe negative impacts of its unilateral tariff measures on itself and the world.”

Previously, China had demanded that President Trump drop all tariffs to begin negotiations, which Trump refused while seemingly holding out on making a deal on TikTok to keep the potential bargaining chip.

While tensions don’t exactly appear to be dissipating, these talks are the first sign that the trade rivals could reach a resolution after Trump raised tariffs on some Chinese imports as high as 145 percent. And they come just as Americans expect to soon feel the sting from tariffs in their wallets.

According to the Consumer Technology Association’s most recent estimates released Tuesday, Americans risk paying much higher prices for any Chinese imports that are not exempted from those 145 percent tariffs. They also face potentially higher prices from other tariffs the Trump administration imposed, including a baseline 10 percent tariff on all imports from all countries and reciprocal tariffs that kick in July, which would add an additional 11 to 50 percent tax on all imports from 57 countries.

For example, non-exempted video game consoles—perhaps less than 1 percent of which are produced in the US, industry analysts estimate—could soon cost more than $1,000 on average, up by about 69 percent. And as the price goes up, the CTA warned that supply chain disruptions could cause shortages since “shifting the large quantities of Chinese production to other suppliers would be very difficult given the volumes involved.”

Even some of the seemingly less painful smaller price hikes could “rob” the US economy, the CTA warned. For example, headphones costing Americans up to $5 more or speakers costing up to $60 more could drain wallets nationwide by more than $2.5 billion, the CTA estimated. And an estimated 11 percent increase on imports of non-exempt China-made TVs—which only account for a small share of total US TV imports—could significantly hurt the US economy by “forcing consumers to pay $1.9 billion more than they otherwise would for the televisions they continue to buy,” the CTA forecasted.

Meanwhile, “buyers of smartphones, laptops and tablets, and connected devices would likely feel the greatest impact,” the CTA said. In 2023, China accounted for 87 percent of video game consoles, 78 percent of smartphones, 79 percent of laptops and tablets, and 67 percent of monitors imported into the US, and there is still very little US production of those goods. On average, laptops could soon cost more than $1,000, tablets nearly $600, and smartphones nearly $1,100, while connected devices could cost up to 22 percent more, the CTA estimated.

Overall, Trump’s tariff regime threatens to “shrink the US economy by $69 billion annually” from price shifts of just 10 popular tech products, the CTA warned.

To prevent this, the CTA has been advocating on Capitol Hill for more exemptions while urging the Trump administration to stop using tariffs to force production into the US, echoing other analysts who have long warned Trump that shifting supply chains into the US cannot be done immediately.

“The effort to reshore manufacturing through higher tariff rates on imported goods comes at a cost: the research shows that consumers would lose about $16 in spending power for every $1 gained by domestic producers,” the CTA reported. And that loss of spending power, the CTA noted, means Americans have less money to spend on things like groceries or other essential goods that are also impacted by tariffs.

Ahead of talks, China signals the fight isn’t over

Although the US-China talks likely won’t trigger changes on Trump’s tariffs impacting other parts of the world, China’s role as a hard-to-replace global production hub has left many tech companies eager to see trade talks resume.

As consumers brace for sticker shock, tech companies’ revenues could be hit hard if sales significantly decrease. That seems likely, as the CTA is already forecasting drastic drops in consumption of video game consoles (down by up to 73 percent), laptops and tablets (45 percent), and smartphones (nearly 50 percent). For low-income families, the smartphone price hikes could hit the hardest, the CTA warned, which would be especially burdensome since imports triggering price drops only recently were credited with making smartphones more accessible in the US.

China still appears to potentially have the upper hand in negotiations. Trump apparently had been pushing to meet with China’s president Xi Jinping, seemingly wanting to be viewed as the sole dealmaker on tariffs, the South China Morning Post reported. But China refused, insisting on each country appointing special envoys, a concession that Trump appears to have granted in directing Bessent to meet with Xi’s trade chief instead of leading the talks himself.

For China, refusing to deal directly with Trump is depicted as necessary to preserve mutual respect in negotiations. After Trump claimed China was engaged in talks that China denied and suggested that China was “doing very poorly” due to his tariffs, the president suddenly pivoted to promising to “play nice” with China.

Now China seems to be holding Trump to his word. Ahead of trade talks this weekend, China’s Ministry of Commerce warned the US that China wouldn’t resolve trade tensions without safeguarding its own interests, promising to keep fighting “if provoked.”

“If the US says one thing but does another, or even attempts to use negotiations as a pretext to continue coercive and blackmailing tactics, China will never agree, nor will it sacrifice its principles or international fairness and justice to seek any agreement,” the Ministry said.

For US chipmakers who are still waiting for Trump to release his semiconductor tariff plan, the trade talks will likely be watched closely. Ahead of talks, Nvidia, AMD, Super Micro, and Marvell have warned investors of potentially billions in lost revenue, with some postponing further investor guidance until after the tariff plan is revealed, CNBC reported.

Other tech giants both inside and outside the US are also reportedly scrambling, even if they aren’t completely reliant on China-based production.

Despite exemptions on smartphones and a plan to shift production of US-destined products into India, Apple recently estimated that tariffs could add $900 million in costs in this quarter alone, the BBC reported.

So far, there are no clear winners in Trump’s trade war. South Korea-based Samsung—which has a Vietnamese production hub subject to 46 percent tariffs—was expected to potentially gain from any Apple losses. But an executive on a recent earnings call warned investors that “there are a lot of uncertainties ahead of us,” CNBC reported.

“Due to the rapid changes in policies and geopolitical tensions among major countries, it’s difficult to accurately predict the business impact of tariffs and countermeasures,” the Samsung executive said.

And although trade talks could dramatically shift global markets again, the CTA warned that “ongoing reviews of semiconductors and downstream products in the electronics supply chain, copper, lumber, critical minerals, and other materials” could potentially add to cost pressures and trigger even more price hikes for Americans.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump tariffs could make Americans pay $123B more annually for 10 common gadgets Read More »

“Blatantly unlawful”: Trump slammed for trying to defund PBS, NPR

Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Donald Trump, NPR, PBS, Policy / 9u50fv / May 2, 2025

CPB President Patricia Harrison suggested in a statement provided to Ars that these moves to block networks’ funding exceed Trump’s authority.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority,” Harrison said. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger went further, calling the order “blatantly unlawful” in a statement provided to Ars.

“Issued in the middle of the night,” Trump’s order “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years,” Kerger said. “We are currently exploring all options to allow PBS to continue to serve our member stations and all Americans.”

Rural communities need public media, orgs say

While Trump opposes NPR and PBS for promoting content that he disagrees with—criticizing segments on white privilege, gender identity, reparations, “fat phobia,” and abortion—the networks have defended their programming as unbiased and falling in line with Federal Communications Commission guidelines. Further, NPR reported that the networks’ “locally grounded content” currently reaches “more than 99 percent of the population at no cost,” providing not just educational fare and entertainment but also critical updates tied to local emergency and disaster response systems.

Cutting off funding, Kreger said last month, would have a “devastating impact” on rural communities, especially in parts of the country where NPR and PBS still serve as “the only source of news and emergency broadcasts,” NPR reported.

For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations “provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes.” Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported.

“Blatantly unlawful”: Trump slammed for trying to defund PBS, NPR Read More »

Trump orders Ed Dept to make AI a national priority while plotting agency’s death

AI, Artificial Intelligence, department of education, Donald Trump, education, Policy / Shannon Garcia / April 25, 2025

Trump pushes for industry involvement

It seems clear that Trump’s executive order was a reaction to China’s announcement about AI education reforms last week, as Reuters reported. Elsewhere, Singapore and Estonia have laid out their AI education initiatives, Forbes reported, indicating that AI education is increasingly considered critical to any nation’s success.

Trump’s vision for the US requires training teachers and students about what AI is and what it can do. He offers no new appropriations to fund the initiative; instead, he directs a new AI Education Task Force to find existing funding to cover both research into how to implement AI in education and the resources needed to deliver on the executive order’s promises.

Although AI advocates applauded Trump’s initiative, the executive order’s vagueness makes it uncertain how AI education tools will be assessed as Trump pushes for AI to be integrated into “all subject areas.” Possibly using AI in certain educational contexts could disrupt learning by confabulating misinformation, a concern that the Biden administration had in its more cautious approach to AI education initiatives.

Trump also seems to push for much more private sector involvement than Biden did.

The order recommended that education institutions collaborate with industry partners and other organizations to “collaboratively develop online resources focused on teaching K–12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills.” These partnerships will be announced on a “rolling basis,” the order said. It also pushed students and teachers to partner with industry for the Presidential AI Challenge to foster collaboration.

For Trump’s AI education plan to work, he will seemingly need the DOE to stay intact. However, so far, Trump has not acknowledged this tension. In March, he ordered the DOE to dissolve, with power returned to states to ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

Were that to happen, at least 27 states and Puerto Rico—which EdWeek reported have already laid out their own AI education guidelines—might push back, using their power to control federal education funding to pursue their own AI education priorities and potentially messing with Trump’s plan.

Trump orders Ed Dept to make AI a national priority while plotting agency’s death Read More »

White House plagued by Signal controversy as Pentagon in “full-blown meltdown”

Donald Trump, national security, Policy, signal, signalgate / Beth Washington / April 22, 2025

“Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer,” Ullyot forecasted.

According to NPR—which has been the target of Trump threats to rescind funding—four of Hegseth’s senior advisors abruptly quit after The Times report was published. “They have all released public statements suggesting infighting within the department of defense,” NPR reported.

But Trump and Hegseth are presenting a united front against the public backlash. Trump confirmed that he considers any discussion of Hegseth’s chats a “waste of time,” The New York Times reported. And on Sunday, Hegseth told reporters gathered for a White House Easter event that he and Trump are “on the same page all the way.”

Hegseth labeled The Times’ latest report as a “hit piece.” Citing four people familiar with his family Signal chat, NYT report noted that Hegseth updated both Signal groups about the attack plans at about the same time, and these “were among the first big military strikes of Mr. Hegseth’s tenure.”

The implication is that if the media hadn’t outed the Signal use, perhaps Hegseth may have continued risking leaks of confidential military information. And although he and Trump hope the backlash will die down soon, his inclusion of his wife and brother on the second chat likely raises additional flags and “is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols,” the NYT suggested.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, joined the White House in pushing back against reports, claiming the NYT’s sources are “disgruntled” former employees and insisting on X that “there was no classified information in any Signal chat.”

According to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally copied on the initial Signal chat that sparked the backlash, Hegseth shared “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” two hours before the attack.

White House plagued by Signal controversy as Pentagon in “full-blown meltdown” Read More »

Trump can’t keep China from getting AI chips, TSMC suggests

AI chips, Artificial Intelligence, china, Chips Act, Donald Trump, Huawei, NVIDIA, Policy, semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, tariffs, TSMC, us-china trade war / Kelly Newman / April 22, 2025

“Despite TSMC’s best efforts to comply with all relevant export control and sanctions laws and regulations, there is no assurance that its business activities will not be found incompliant with export control laws and regulations,” TSMC said.

Further, “if TSMC or TSMC’s business partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export or re-export licenses or permits or are found to have violated applicable export control or sanctions laws, TSMC may also be adversely affected, through reputational harm as well as other negative consequences, including government investigations and penalties resulting from relevant legal proceedings,” TSMC warned.

Trump’s tariffs may end TSMC’s “tariff-proof” era

TSMC is thriving despite years of tariffs and export controls, its report said, with at least one analyst suggesting that, so far, the company appears “somewhat tariff-proof.” However, all of that could be changing fast, as “US President Donald Trump announced in 2025 an intention to impose more expansive tariffs on imports into the United States,” TSMC said.

“Any tariffs imposed on imports of semiconductors and products incorporating chips into the United States may result in increased costs for purchasing such products, which may, in turn, lead to decreased demand for TSMC’s products and services and adversely affect its business and future growth,” TSMC said.

And if TSMC’s business is rattled by escalations in the US-China trade war, TSMC warned, that risks disrupting the entire global semiconductor supply chain.

Trump’s semiconductor tariff plans remain uncertain. About a week ago, Trump claimed the rates would be unveiled “over the next week,” Reuters reported, which means they could be announced any day now.

Trump can’t keep China from getting AI chips, TSMC suggests Read More »

Trump’s tariffs trigger price hikes at large online retailers

Amazon, Donald Trump, eCommerce, Online Shopping, Policy, shein, tariffs, temu, us-china trade war / Kelly Newman / April 18, 2025

Popular online shopping meccas Temu and Shein have finally broken their silence, warning of potential price hikes starting next week due to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Temu is a China-based e-commerce platform that has grown as popular as Amazon for global shoppers making cross-border purchases, according to 2024 Statista data. Its tagline, “Shop like a billionaire,” is inextricably linked to the affordability of items on its platform. And although Shein—which vows to make global fashion “accessible to all” by selling inexpensive stylish clothing—moved its headquarters from China to Singapore in 2022, most of its products are still controversially manufactured in China, the BBC reported.

For weeks, the US-China trade war has seen both sides spiking tariffs. In the US, the White House last night crunched the numbers and confirmed that China now faces tariffs of up to 245 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. That figure includes new tariffs Trump has imposed, taxing all Chinese goods by 145 percent, as well as prior 100 percent tariffs lobbed by the Biden administration that are still in effect on EVs and Chinese syringes.

Last week, China announced that it would stop retaliations, CNBC reported. But that came after China rolled out 125 percent tariffs on US goods. While China has since accused Trump of weaponizing tariffs to “an irrational level,” other retaliations have included increasingly cutting off US access to critical minerals used in tech manufacturing and launching antitrust probes into US companies.

For global retailers, the tit-for-tat tariffs have immediately scrambled business plans. Particularly for Temu and Shein, Trump’s decision to end the “de minimis” exemption on May 2—which allowed shipments valued under $800 to be imported duty-free—will soon hit hard, exposing them to 90 percent tariffs that inevitably led to next week’s price shifts. According to The Guardian, starting on June 1, retailers will have to pay $150 tariffs on each individual package.

Trump’s tariffs trigger price hikes at large online retailers Read More »

Apple silent as Trump promises “impossible” US-made iPhones

Apple, china, china tariffs, Donald Trump, Foxconn, IPhone, Policy, tariffs, tim cook, us, us-china trade war / Kelly Newman / April 12, 2025

How does Apple solve a problem like Trump’s trade war?

Despite a recent pause on some tariffs, Apple remains in a particularly thorny spot as Donald Trump’s trade war spikes costs in the tech company’s iPhone manufacturing hub, China.

Analysts predict that Apple has no clear short-term options to shake up its supply chain to avoid tariffs entirely, and even if Trump grants Apple an exemption, iPhone prices may increase not just in the US but globally.

The US Trade Representative, which has previously granted Apple an exemption on a particular product, did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on whether any requests for exemptions have been submitted in 2025.

Currently, the US imposes a 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports, while China has raised tariffs on US imports to 125 percent.

Neither side seems ready to back down, and Trump’s TikTok deal—which must be approved by the Chinese government—risks further delays the longer negotiations and retaliations drag on. Trump has faced criticism for delaying the TikTok deal, with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) telling The Verge last week that the delay was “against the law” and threatened US national security. Meanwhile, China seems to expect more business to flow into China rather than into the US as a result of Trump’s tough stance on global trade.

With the economy and national security at risk, Trump is claiming that tariffs will drive manufacturing into the US, create jobs, and benefit the economy. Getting the world’s most valuable company, Apple, to manufacture its most popular product, the iPhone, in the US, is clearly part of Trump’s vision. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week that Apple’s commitment to invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years was supposedly a clear indicator that Apple believed it was feasible to build iPhones here, Bloomberg reported.

“If Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” Leavitt said.

Apple did not respond to Ars’ request to comment, and so far, it has been silent on how tariffs are impacting its business.

iPhone price increases expected globally

For Apple, even if it can build products for the US market in India, where tariffs remain lower, Trump’s negotiations with China “remain the most important variable for Apple” to retain its global dominance.

Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC that “Apple could be set back many years by these tariffs.” Although Apple reportedly stockpiled phones to sell in the US market, that supply will likely dwindle fast as customers move to purchase phones before prices spike. In the medium-term, consultancy firm Omdia forecasted, Apple will likely “focus on increasing iPhone production and exports from India” rather than pushing its business into the US, as Trump desires.

But Apple will still incur additional costs from tariffs on India until that country tries to negotiate a more favorable trade deal. And any exemption that Apple may secure due to its investment promise in the US or moderation of China tariffs that could spare Apple some pain “may not be enough for Apple to avoid adverse business effects,” co-founder and senior analyst at equity research publisher MoffettNathanson, Craig Moffett, suggested to CNBC.

And if Apple is forced to increase prices, it likely won’t be limited to just the US, Bank of America Securities analyst Wamsi Mohan suggested, as reported by The Guardian. To ensure that Apple’s largest market isn’t the hardest hit, Apple may increase prices “across the board geographically,” he forecasted.

“While Apple has not commented on this, we expect prices will be changed globally to prevent arbitrage,” Mohan said.

Apple may even choose to increase prices everywhere but the US, vice president at Forrester Research, Dipanjan Chatterjee, explained in The Guardian’s report.

“If there is a cost impact in the US for certain products,” Chatterjee said, Apple may not increase US prices because “the market is far more competitive there.” Instead, “the company may choose to keep prices flat in the US while recovering the lost margin elsewhere in its global portfolio,” Chatterjee said.

Trump’s US-made iPhone may be an impossible dream

Analysts have said that Trump’s dream that a “made-in-the-USA” iPhone could be coming soon is divorced from reality. Not only do analysts estimate that more than 80 percent of Apple products are currently made in China, but so are many individual parts. So even if Apple built an iPhone factory in the US, it would still have to pay tariffs on individual parts, unless Trump agreed to a seemingly wide range of exemptions. Mohan estimated it would “likely take many years” to move the “entire iPhone supply chain,” if that’s “even possible.”

Further, Apple’s $500 billion commitment covered “building servers for its artificial intelligence products, Apple TV productions and 20,000 new jobs in research and development—not a promise to make the iPhone stateside,” The Guardian noted.

For Apple, it would likely take years to build a US factory and attract talent, all without knowing how tariffs might change. A former Apple manufacturing engineer, Matthew Moore, told Bloomberg that “there are millions of people employed by the Apple supply chain in China,” and Apple has long insisted that the US talent pool is too small to easily replace them.

“What city in America is going to put everything down and build only iPhones?” Moore said. “Boston is over 500,000 people. The whole city would need to stop everything and start assembling iPhones.”

In a CBS interview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that the “army of millions and millions of human beings” could be automated, Bloomberg reported. But China has never been able to make low-cost automation work, so it’s unclear how the US could achieve that goal without serious investment.

“That’s not yet realistic,” people who have worked on Apple’s product manufacturing told Bloomberg, especially since each new iPhone model requires retooling of assembly, which typically requires manual labor. Other analysts agreed, CNBC reported, concluding that “the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.”

For consumers, CNBC noted, a US-made iPhone would cost anywhere from 25 percent more than the $1,199 price point today, increasing to about $1,500 at least, to potentially $3,500 at most, Wall Street analysts have forecasted.

It took Apple a decade to build its factory in India, which Apple reportedly intends to use to avoid tariffs where possible. That factory “only began producing Apple’s top-of-the-line Pro and Pro Max iPhone models for the first time last year,” CNBC reported.

Analysts told CNBC that it would take years to launch a similar manufacturing process in the US, while “there’s no guarantee that US trade policy might not change yet again in a way to make the factory less useful.”

Apple CEO’s potential game plan to navigate tariffs

It appears that there’s not much Apple can do to avoid maximum pain through US-China negotiations. But Apple’s CEO Tim Cook—who is considered “a supply chain whisperer”—may be “uniquely suited” to navigate Trump’s trade war, Fortune reported.

After Cook arrived at Apple in 1998, he “redesigned Apple’s sprawling supply chain” and perhaps is game to do that again, Fortune reported. Jeremy Friedman, associate professor of business and geopolitics at Harvard Business School, told Fortune that rather than being stuck in the middle, Cook may turn out to be a key intermediary, helping the US and China iron out a deal.

During Trump’s last term, Cook raised a successful “charm offensive” that secured tariff exemptions without caving to Trump’s demand to build iPhones in the US, CNBC reported, and he’s likely betting that Apple’s recent $500 billion commitment will lead to similar outcomes, even if Apple never delivers a US-made iPhone.

Back in 2017, Trump announced that Apple partner Foxconn would be building three “big beautiful plants” in the US and claimed that they would be Apple plants, CNBC reported. But the pandemic disrupted construction, and most of those plans were abandoned, with one facility only briefly serving to make face masks, not Apple products. In 2019, Apple committed to building a Texas factory that Trump toured. While Trump insisted that a US-made iPhone was on the horizon due to Apple moving some business into the US, that factory only committed to assembling the MacBook Pro, CNBC noted.

Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring suggested that Apple may “commit to some small-volume production in the US (HomePod? AirTags?)” to secure an exemption in 2025, rather than committing to building iPhones, CNBC reported.

Although this perhaps sounds like a tried-and-true game plan, for Cook, Apple’s logistics have likely never been so complicated. However, analysts told Fortune that experienced logistics masterminds understand that flexibility is the priority, and Cook has already shown that he can anticipate Trump’s moves by stockpiling iPhones and redirecting US-bound iPhones through its factory in India.

While Trump negotiates with China, Apple hopes that an estimated 35 million iPhones it makes annually in India can “cover a large portion of its needs in the US,” Bloomberg reported. These moves, analysts said, prove that Cook may be the man for the job when it comes to steering Apple through the trade war chaos.

But to keep up with global demand—selling more than 220 million iPhones annually—Apple will struggle to quickly distance itself from China, where there’s abundant talent to scale production that Apple says just doesn’t exist in the US. For example, CNBC noted that Foxconn hired 50,000 additional workers last fall at its largest China plant just to build enough iPhones to meet demand during the latest September launches.

As Apple remains dependent on China, Cook will likely need to remain at the table, seeking friendlier terms on both sides to ensure its business isn’t upended for years.

“One can imagine, if there is some sort of grand bargain between US and China coming in the next year or two,” Friedman said, “Tim Cook might as soon as anybody play an intermediary role.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Apple silent as Trump promises “impossible” US-made iPhones Read More »

Here are the reasons SpaceX won nearly all recent military launch contracts

Donald Trump, elon musk, Space, spacex, united launch alliance / Beth Washington / April 10, 2025

“I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, speak to the press as they stand next to a Tesla vehicle on the South Portico of the White House on March 11, 2025. Credit: Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP

In the last week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, and then it assigned the vast majority of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX.

On top of these actions, the Space Force reassigned the launch of a GPS navigation satellite from United Launch Alliance’s long-delayed Vulcan rocket to fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is SpaceX’s chief US rival in the market for military satellite launches.

Given the close relationship between Musk and President Donald Trump, it’s not out of bounds to ask why SpaceX is racking up so many wins. Some plans floated by the Trump administration involving SpaceX in recent months have raised concerns over conflicts of interest.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, doesn’t seem too worried in his public statements. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk’s ties with Trump.

“We have not been impacted by our competitor’s position advising the president, certainly not yet,” Bruno said. “I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we’re behaving that way.”

It’s a separate concern whether the Pentagon should predominantly rely on a single provider for access to space, be it a launch company like SpaceX led by a billionaire government insider or a provider like ULA that, so far, hasn’t proven its new Vulcan rocket can meet the Space Force’s schedules.

Military officials are unanimous in their answer to that question: “No.” That’s why the Space Force is keen to add to the Pentagon’s roster of launch providers. In the last 12 months, the Space Force has brought Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Stoke Space to join SpaceX and ULA in the mix for national security launches.

Results matter

The reason Bruno can say Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn’t affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon’s satellites. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

The Pentagon announced Friday that SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin—Jeff Bezos’ space company—won contracts worth $13.7 billion to share responsibilities for launching approximately 54 of the military’s most critical space missions from 2027 through 2032. SpaceX received the lion’s share of the missions with an award for 28 launches, while ULA got 19. Blue Origin, a national security launch business newcomer, will fly seven missions.

This comes out to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA, not counting Blue Origin’s seven launches, which the Space Force set aside for a third contractor. It’s a reversal of the 60-40 sharing scheme in the last big military launch competition in 2020, when ULA took the top award over SpaceX. Space Force officials anticipate Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will be certified for national security missions next year, allowing it to begin winning launch task orders.

Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, speaks with reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 6, 2024. Credit: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images

Bruno said he wasn’t surprised with the outcome of this year’s launch competition, known as Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. “We’re happy to get it,” he said Monday.

“I felt that winning 60 percent the first time was a little bit of an upset,” Bruno said of the 2020 competition with SpaceX. “I believe they expected to win 60 then … Therefore, I believed this time around that they would compete that much harder, and that I was not going to price dive in order to guarantee a win.”

While we know roughly how many launches each company will get from the Space Force, the military hasn’t determined which specific missions will fly with ULA, SpaceX, or Blue Origin. Once per year, the Space Force will convene a “mission assignment board” to divvy up individual task orders.

Simply geography

Officials announced Monday that this year’s assignment board awarded seven missions to SpaceX and two launches to ULA. The list includes six Space Force missions and three for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

SpaceX’s seven wins are worth a combined $845.8 million, with an average price of $120.8 million per launch. Three will fly on Falcon 9 rockets, and four will launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

NROL-97 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
USSF-15 (GPS IIIF-3) on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
USSF-174 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
USSF-186 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
USSF-234 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral
NROL-96 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg
NROL-157 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg

The Space Force’s two orders to ULA are valued at $427.6 million, averaging $213.8 million per mission. Both missions will launch from Florida, one with a GPS navigation satellite to medium-Earth orbit and another with a next-generation geosynchronous missile warning satellite named NGG-2.

USSF-49 (GPS IIIF-2) on a Vulcan from Cape Canaveral
USSF-50 (NGG-2) on a Vulcan from Cape Canaveral

So, why did ULA only get 22 percent of this year’s task orders instead of something closer to 40 percent? It turns out ULA was not eligible for two of these missions because the company’s West Coast launch pad for the Vulcan rocket is still under construction at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Space Force won’t assign specific West Coast missions to ULA until the launch pad is finished and certified, according to Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, chief of the Space Force’s “Assured Access to Space” office.

Vandenberg, a military facility on the Southern California coast, has a wide range of open ocean to the south, perfect for rockets delivering payloads into polar orbits. Rockets flown out of Cape Canaveral typically fly to the east on trajectories useful for launching satellites into the GPS network or into geosynchronous orbit.

“A company can be certified for a subset of missions while it continues to work on meeting the certification criteria for the broader set of missions,” Panzenhagen said. “In this case, ULA was not certified for West Coast launches yet. They’re working on that.”

Because of this rule, SpaceX won task orders for the NROL-96 and NROL-157 missions by default.

The Space Force’s assignment of the USSF-15 mission to SpaceX makes some sense, too. Going forward, the Space Force wants to have Vulcan and Falcon Heavy as options for adding to the GPS network. This will be the first GPS payload to launch on Falcon Heavy, allowing SpaceX engineers to complete a raft of upfront analysis and integration work. Engineers won’t have to repeat this work on future Falcon Heavy flights carrying identical GPS satellites.

From monopoly to niche

A decade ago, ULA was the sole launch provider to deploy the Pentagon’s fleet of surveillance, communication, and navigation satellites. The Air Force certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for national security missions in May 2015, opening the market for competition for the first time since Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged their rocket divisions to create ULA in 2006.

ULA’s monopoly, which Bruno acknowledged, has now eroded into making the company a niche player in the military launch market.

“A monopoly is not healthy,” he said. “We were one for a few years before I came to ULA, and that was because no one else had the capability, and there weren’t that many missions. There weren’t enough to support many providers. There are now, so this is better.”

There are at least a couple of important reasons the Space Force is flying more missions than 10 or 20 years ago.

One is that Pentagon officials believe the United States is now in competition with a near-peer great power, China, with a rapidly growing presence in space. Military leaders say this requires more US hardware in orbit. Another is that the cost of launching something into space is lower than it was when ULA enjoyed its dominant position. SpaceX has led the charge in reducing the cost of accessing space, thanks to its success in pioneering reusable commercial rockets.

Many of the new types of missions the Space Force plans to launch in the next few years will go to low-Earth orbit (LEO), a region of space a few hundred miles above the planet. There, the Space Force plans to deploy hundreds of satellites for a global missile detection, missile tracking, and data relay network. Eventually, the military may place hundreds or more space-based interceptors in LEO as part of the “Golden Dome” missile defense program pushed by the Trump administration.

United Launch Alliance’s second Vulcan rocket underwent a countdown dress rehearsal last year. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Traditionally, the military has operated missile tracking and communications satellites in much higher geosynchronous orbits some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At that altitude, satellites revolve around the Earth at the same speed as the planet’s rotation, allowing a spacecraft to maintain a constant vigil over the same location.

The Space Force still has a few of those kinds of missions to launch, along with mobile, globe-trotting surveillance satellites and eavesdropping signals intelligence spy platforms for the National Reconnaissance Office. Bruno argues ULA’s Vulcan rocket, despite being more expensive, is best suited for these bespoke missions. So far, the Space Force’s awards seem to bear it out.

“Our rocket has a unique niche within this marketplace,” Bruno said. “There really are two kinds of missions from the rocket’s standpoint. There are ones where you drop off in LEO, and there are ones where you drop off in higher orbits. You design your rockets differently for that. It doesn’t mean we can’t drop off in LEO, it doesn’t mean [SpaceX] can’t drop off in a higher energy orbit, but we’re more efficient at those because we designed for that.”

There’s some truth in that argument. The Vulcan rocket’s upper stage, called the Centaur V, burns liquid hydrogen fuel with better fuel efficiency than the kerosene-fueled engine on SpaceX’s upper stage. And SpaceX must use the more expensive Falcon Heavy rocket for the most demanding missions, expending the rocket’s core booster to devote more propellant toward driving the payload into orbit.

SpaceX has launched at a rate nearly 34 times higher than United Launch Alliance since the start of 2023, but ULA has more experience with high-energy missions, featuring more complex maneuvers to place military payloads directly into geosynchronous orbit, and sometimes releasing multiple payloads at different locations in the geosynchronous belt.

This is one of the most challenging mission profiles for any rocket, requiring a high-endurance upper stage, like Vulcan’s Centaur V, capable of cruising through space for eight or more hours.

SpaceX has flown a long-duration version of its upper stage on several missions by adding an extended mission kit. This gives the rocket longer battery life and a custom band of thermal paint to help ensure its kerosene fuel does not freeze in the cold environment of space.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket rolls to the launch pad in Florida in June 2024. The rocket’s upper stage sports a strip of gray thermal paint to keep propellants at the proper temperature for a long-duration cruise through space. Credit: SpaceX

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of SpaceX’s missions target low-Earth orbit, where Falcon 9 rockets deploy Starlink Internet satellites, send crews and cargo to the International Space Station, and regularly launch multi-payload rideshare missions. These launches maximize the Falcon 9’s efficiencies with booster recovery and reuse. SpaceX is proficient and prolific with these missions, launching them every couple of days. Launch, land, repeat.

“They tend to be more efficient at the LEO drop-offs, I’ll be honest about that,” Bruno said. “That means there’s a competitive space in the middle, and then there’s kind of these end cases. So, we’ll keep winning when it’s way over in our space, they will win when it’s way over in theirs, and then in the middle it’s kind of a toss-up for any given mission.”

Recent history seems to support Bruno’s hypothesis. Last year, SpaceX and ULA competed head-to-head for nine specific launch contracts, or task orders, in a different Space Force competition. The launches will place national security satellites into low-Earth orbit, and SpaceX won all nine of them. Since 2020, ULA has won more Space Force task orders than SpaceX for high-energy missions, although the inverse was true in this year’s round of launch orders.

The military’s launch contracting strategy gives the Space Force flexibility to swap payloads between rockets, add more missions, or deviate from the 60-40 share to SpaceX and ULA. This has precedent. Between 2020 and 2024, ULA received 54 percent of military launches, short of the 60 percent anticipated in their original contract. This amounted to ULA winning three fewer task orders, or a lost value of about $350 million, because of delays in development of the Vulcan rocket.

That’s the cost of doing business with the Pentagon. Military officials don’t want their satellites sitting on the ground. The national policy of assured access to space materialized after the Challenger accident in 1986. NASA grounded the Space Shuttle for two-and-a-half years, and the military had no other way to put its largest satellites into orbit, leading the Pentagon to accelerate development of new versions of the Atlas, Delta, and Titan rockets dating back to the 1960s.

Military and intelligence officials were again stung by a spate of failures with the Titan IV in the 1990s, when it was the only heavy-lift launcher in the Pentagon’s inventory. Then, ULA’s Delta IV Heavy rocket was the sole heavy-lifter available to the military for nearly two decades. Today, the Space Force has two heavy-lift options and may have a third soon with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

This all has the added benefit of bringing down costs, according to Col. Doug Pentecost, deputy director of the Space Force’s Assured Access to Space directorate.

“If you bundle a bunch of missions together, you can get a better price point,” he said. “We awarded $13.7 billion. We thought this was going to cost us 15.5, so we saved $1.7 billion with this competition, showing that we have great industry out there trying to do good stuff for us.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Here are the reasons SpaceX won nearly all recent military launch contracts Read More »