On: A Mysterious Nonprofit Run by SpaceXAI’s Top Lawyer Is Paying the Salaries of...

7 October 2026

A private nonprofit, governed by no electorate, now pays the salaries of officials inside a government agency. The agency calls these workers its own. The payroll says otherwise. I have spent my life arguing that the purse is the skeleton of power, and here the skeleton has been removed from the public body entirely and reassembled in private hands.

Consider the mechanism rather than the press release. Who appoints the directors of this nonprofit? The general counsel of a corporation that holds billions in government contracts. Who evaluates its spending? Whomever the directors choose. What recourse does Congress possess over an employee whose wages arrive from a private ledger? None that I can identify. The employee’s loyalty follows the signature line on the check - this is not cynicism, it is arithmetic.

It will be objected that the arrangement is efficient, that it moves talent into government quickly, unencumbered by hiring rules designed for a slower age. Grant the premise. Efficiency purchased with dependency is not efficiency; it is leasehold. The talent serves so long as the private purse approves, and the private purse answers to a man whose employer seeks favorable treatment from the very government his charity staffs. Suppose the corporation wants a contract steered, a regulation softened, an audit quieted. What does the mechanism produce? It produces officials who know where their bread is buttered and who butters it.

The founders of public credit understood that whoever funds the government governs it. We fought a revolution over this proposition, in part. Now it returns wearing the costume of innovation - no taxes levied, no votes sought, only salaries quietly flowing through a side door. The door is the danger. Walls with doors in them belong to whoever holds the key, and the key here is private.

I would rather fund government honestly and badly than corruptly and well. One can be repaired. The other must be demolished.