While the dramatic public feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk plays out, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act quietly hands Starlink and satellite internet providers a potential multimillion-dollar payday—on top of gutting health care and food assistance. Whether Trump and Musk stay enemies or patch things up, a recent update to the partisan tax and budget bill in the Senate could mean millions of dollars for Elon Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink, all while an artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory moratorium silences states trying to stand up to Big Tech in the process.
A national tech policy Trojan horse
The draft legislation released by the Senate Commerce Committee last week adds $500 million in new funding to the existing $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which expands high-speed internet access across the United States. But there is a catch: The bill text also imposes a 10-year moratorium on all state and local AI regulation, with limited exceptions for laws that facilitate AI deployment. This moratorium applies nationwide and automatically once the bill becomes law to all states and localities—whether or not they seek BEAD funds. The bill conditions the new $500 million in broadband funding on compliance with the moratorium. However, because the moratorium applies to all states and local governments once the bill becomes law, they would all meet the compliance requirement simply by existence of the law.
The moratorium proposal transforms a broadband bill into a national tech policy Trojan horse.
An AI moratorium would prevent policy development at the state level that could be adopted nationally, prematurely hinder states from mitigating known risks of AI, and force states to freeze any new and existing regulation of artificial intelligence, no matter how urgent or harmful the use case. That could include laws aimed at addressing algorithmic harm, biometric surveillance, or data protection. Since Congress has not acted to provide national AI laws, this significantly dampens the effect of risk and harm mitigation efforts from states, including for generative AI safety and misinformation, facial recognition and surveillance in schools, and employment and health care algorithmic bias. This is not a neutral technology policy. Rather, it is a blanket silencing of states, especially those that have led the way in protecting Americans from the worst harms and risks of AI. In effect, the moratorium proposal transforms a broadband bill into a national tech policy Trojan horse that may funnel money to an industry dominated by Elon Musk. No previous infrastructure legislation has ever included a tech policy gag order as a condition of access.
Qualification under reconciliation
Because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes the largest cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in American history while giving the wealthiest Americans massive new tax breaks, congressional Republicans are working to pass a budget bill under a process called reconciliation, which allows tax and spending legislation to pass the Senate by a simple majority vote. The reconciliation process requires members to advance legislation under specific rules, including the Byrd rule, which limits the kind of provisions that can be included in a reconciliation bill. The AI moratorium likely violates the Byrd rule, which prevents provisions whose budgetary impacts are merely incidental to the underlying policy. While the inclusion of the additional BEAD funding and the moratorium affects the budget, the purpose of the moratorium is not primarily about the flow of federal dollars but rather to entice a state action around nonbudgetary legislation.
In March of 2025, the Commerce Department quietly reversed a key Biden-era guideline in the BEAD program that prioritized building out fiber networks, long considered the gold standard for reliable, high-speed internet. The BEAD program began as a $42.5 billion Biden-era program to expand broadband access, especially in rural and underserved communities. President Trump and his allies called it “woke broadband” for including labor standards, climate resilience, and equity provisions and explicitly made changes to the program that prioritized satellite over fiber, which could benefit Starlink. Long before the feud between the president and Musk, the Trump administration was pushing Starlink across the government, including by installing it at the White House and pressuring governments to allow it alongside tariff negotiations.
On June 6, 2025, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published its BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice, which introduced a new so-called tech-neutral approach that replaces a preference for high-speed, reliable, and long-term scalable technologies. While satellite internet can at times be the appropriate solution, the Trump administration is clearly pushing it aggressively to benefit Starlink. Former BEAD Director Evan Feinman told The Financial Times in March that before he left the program, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick instructed BEAD’s workers to give more priority to satellite connectivity and “singled out Musk’s provider, Starlink.”
What satellite internet such as Starlink can do, however, is rapidly absorb federal funds with far fewer labor or infrastructure constraints.
Satellite technology cannot match fiber on speed, reliability, or long-term scalability. What satellite internet such as Starlink can do, however, is rapidly absorb federal funds with far fewer labor or infrastructure constraints. Starlink, the dominant player in the satellite internet industry, brought in an estimated $7.7 billion in revenue last year and is projected to make $11.8 billion in 2025, thanks in part to a growing list of military contracts, including a $537 million deal to support Ukraine. If this provision passes, even a fraction of this additional $500 million pool would represent a substantial public subsidy for a company still struggling to meet the performance standards that fiber has already achieved. And that does not include the potentially $42.5 billion in existing BEAD funding the administration may push to Starlink.
State officials have reported mounting pressure from Trump-aligned policymakers to steer BEAD grants toward satellite-based options, with Starlink as the implicit, or sometimes explicit, beneficiary. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) have raised red flags that this shift guts BEAD’s original goals, diverting funds from local providers and fiber cooperatives to a billionaire-owned company with a direct line to the president. This is a new era of broadband politics—one no longer about connecting the underserved, but rather seemingly about reshaping infrastructure spending to reward loyalty over outcomes.
Conclusion
At the moment, President Trump and Elon Musk appear to be easing their feud, with Musk publicly walking back some of his attacks. Just days earlier, Trump was threatening to cancel Musk’s electric vehicle contracts, and the current Senate Republican budget proposal would eliminate electric vehicle tax credits that benefit his company Tesla. And yet, behind the drama, Musk is poised to gain significantly from the Starlink-friendly direction the BEAD program is taking. Whether the president and Musk are trading insults or posing together in the Oval Office, this bill reveals a deeper alignment: one where Big Tech writes the rules, states are told to sit down, and public infrastructure becomes a tool of private enrichment. The broadband revolution was supposed to serve the public. Under this bill, it serves to benefit the richest man on Earth—whether Trump likes him or not.
The author would like to thank Adam Conner, Ben Olinsky, Nicole Alvarez, Bobby Kogan, Lily Roberts, Colin Seeberger, Madeline Shepherd, and Alice Lillydahl for their contributions to this piece.