Why Elon Musk installed his top lieutenants at a federal agency you probably haven't heard of

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the rooftop patio of the General Services Administration headquarters, an agency staffer recently discovered something strange: a rectangular device attached to a wire that snaked across the roof, over the ledge and into the administrator’s window one floor below.

It didn’t take long for the employee — an IT specialist — to figure out the device was a transceiver that communicates with Elon Musk’s vast and private Starlink satellite network. Concerned that the equipment violated federal laws designed to protect public data, staffers reported the discovery to superiors and the agency’s internal watchdog.

The Starlink equipment raises a host of questions about what Musk and his efficiency czars are doing at GSA, an obscure agency that is playing an outsized role in the Trump administration’s quest to slash costs and bring the federal government to heel.

Among other clues that GSA is a critical cog in Musk’s stated efforts to slash billions of dollars in federal spending: people with ties to the entrepreneur or his companies hold key jobs at the agency. Its acting administrator is a Silicon Valley tech executive with expertise in rolling out artificial intelligence tools and a wife who once worked for Musk at his social media company, X.

An engineer at Tesla, the...
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