President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”

Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).

Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

[Read: Hungary joins the DOGE efforts]

All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.

DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.

But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.

Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”

“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.

That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.

[Juliette Kayyem: Is DOGE sure it wants to fire these people?]

That pushback from inside the administration was combined with rising public anger about the cuts that exploded at several lawmakers’ town halls in recent weeks. From Georgia to Kansas, Republicans took sharp criticism about the cuts, including from some in the crowds who described themselves as Trump voters and veterans. The National Republican Congressional Committee told lawmakers this week to postpone holding any further town halls. The anger reverberated to Capitol Hill this week, with several Republicans privately urging DOGE to slow down.

Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN on Tuesday that Cabinet secretaries should retain the full power to hire and fire, a belief he later reiterated privately to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to one of the White House officials who was briefed on the call. This person told me that in recent weeks, Wiles has also relayed to Trump other GOP lawmakers’ concerns about Musk, including that the constant drip of stories about DOGE slashing key jobs is distracting from their political messaging on issues such as immigration and taxes.

Musk was invited to a Senate lunch on Wednesday, a meal that took place just hours after the Supreme Court delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration in one of several ongoing legal fights over spending cuts. In the meeting, lawmakers later told reporters, several senators urged Musk to better coordinate with Congress by giving them more visibility into his process. They also offered to make the cuts permanent by enshrining them in legislation.

Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters afterward that the “the system needs to be fine-tuned to coordinate between DOGE and Congress and the administration,” and that Musk needs to be better about addressing senators’ concerns. Musk, in the lunch, distanced himself from some of the more unpopular firings. Hours later, he had a similar meeting with House Republicans, some of whom voiced unhappiness with that day’s news reports about plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers, thousands of whom are veterans themselves, in a move that would likely delay vital services to those who have served the country in uniform.

Trump also grew angry at those reports, snapping at aides that he did not want to be seen as someone who betrayed veterans, many of whom he believes voted for him, an outside adviser who spoke with the president told me. That, when combined with the complaints from his advisers and worries that Musk was beginning to drag down his own poll numbers, prompted him to call for the meeting with the DOGE leader and the Cabinet heads at the White House yesterday.

The meeting soon grew volatile, according to an official present, with Rubio snapping back at Musk when the billionaire accused him of not moving fast enough with his firings. Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also clashed over the quality of air-traffic controllers, while Doug Collins, who runs the Department of Veterans Affairs, urged that any layoffs be done more carefully. Trump agreed. Details of the meeting were first reported today by The New York Times. In addition to announcing that the Cabinet secretaries would be in charge of firings, Trump said that similar meetings would be held every two weeks.

“Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement when I asked if Musk’s role is shrinking.

Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in a statement: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.” The Departments of Defense and Transportation, the FBI, and the VA, as well as DOGE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk later wrote on X that the meeting was “very productive.” Yet for some in MAGA’s populist wing, the moment was perceived as a humiliation for the billionaire. They rallied around efforts to protect the Pentagon and the authority of Hegseth, a popular figure on the right. A cartoon of Trump walking Musk like a dog on a leash was passed around on the Hill and in right-wing-media circles. Some predicted that Trump would soon jettison his billionaire completely.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

The White House insists that Musk’s work will continue. The Office of Personnel Management outlined plans this week for a new wave of firings, offering guidance to cut entire teams and job categories. Most of those fired so far have been probationary employees, who are typically new hires with fewer job protections.

Democrats, who see Musk as a potent political target for their party, have downplayed the significance of Musk’s seeming demotion.

“I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed.” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told me. “It’s not about government efficiency and effectiveness. It’s about crippling the federal workforce because he sees it as a threat to him instead of a service provider to the country.”

In an effort to ward off other court challenges, the administration has also tried to stress that Musk, who is a special government employee, is not technically running the U.S. DOGE Service; instead, the White House said last month, DOGE is administered by Amy Gleason, a former health-care executive who worked for the agency in a previous iteration.

The claim was undermined, however, by Trump’s own words: When he spoke before Congress on Tuesday night, he repeatedly referred to Musk as the head of DOGE.

When I was a child, in the 1990s, there was only one kind of salt; we called it “salt.” It came in a blue cylindrical container—you probably know the one—and we dumped it into pasta water and decanted it into shakers. I didn’t know that any other kind existed, and the women who taught me to cook didn’t seem to, either: Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Moosewood Cookbook all call, simply, for “salt” in their recipes.

But about a decade ago, I started buying coarse kosher salt instead of the fine, uniform, iodized table salt I’d grown up with. I do not remember why. As my friends grew up and started building their own pantries, many of them also made kosher salt their default. These days, The New York Times calls explicitly for kosher salt in nearly all of its recipes, as does Bon Appétit. Two of the most influential cookbooks of the past decade, The Food Lab, by J. Kenji López-Alt, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat, both devote paragraphs to the benefits of kosher over table salt. It is now “the lingua franca of restaurant kitchens”—as Mark Bitterman, who has written four books about cooking with salt, put it—and a cheffy shibboleth in home kitchens, too. You can find Diamond Crystal, the coolest brand, in the background of the famously verisimilitudinous restaurant show The Bear, and on cooking influencers’ beautiful countertops; in 2023, when Trader Joe’s started carrying it, chef Reddit exploded in enthusiastic all caps.

Pretty much everyone eats salt, every day, and it’s different now. Yet even kosher salt’s most fervent converts may not entirely understand how it’s different.

Kosher salt, like all salt, is NaCl—sodium ions electrostatically bound with chloride ions and arranged in a crystal formation. Unlike certain specialty salts, it doesn’t have unique properties by virtue of its provenance; it’s not collected from the coast of France or mined from a mountain in Pakistan. Kosher salt is just big salt.

It’s also more expensive than table salt. You might assume that this is because it has been manufactured according to a stringent set of religious rules. But much iodized table salt is kosher—that is, prepared in adherence with Jewish dietary law—and what we call “kosher salt” isn’t categorically kosher: If you’re feeling pedantic, the right term would be “koshering salt,” because its oversize, craggy crystals are best for drawing the blood out of animals during kosher slaughter.

America’s great salt swap began in the 1980s, when farmers’-market culture and the health-food movement helped American chefs acquaint themselves with specialty ingredients, Bitterman told me: Himalayan pink salt; “bad-ass, real good” fleur de sel from France.

But by and large, chefs settled on kosher as their go-to. They did this for a reason so unbelievably basic that I laughed out loud when I first heard it: Kosher salt is easier to pick up. “Table salt is too hard to pinch,” Adam Ragusea, a food YouTuber, told me. “I mean, just try it. Anyone who’s reading, just try it. Just pick it up … It’s a pain in the ass, and it’s messy.”

Kosher salt is simply better for the way chefs tend to season their food, which is frequently, and without measuring, by eye and by feel. No one wants to be fiddling with a teaspoon on the line at a busy restaurant during the dinner rush. “You can really feel it sort of touching your fingers, and leaving your fingers,” Chris Morocco, the food director at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, told me, whereas finer salt “has a tendency to want to slip away.”

Kosher salt’s migration to home kitchens started in the late ’90s, when the Food Network became a cultural force. Its big crystals suddenly had an added benefit: They look great being pinched out of a saltcellar and flung around on television, or at least better than table salt does being juddered out of a shaker. (Ina Garten, one of the network’s early celebrities, has described Diamond Crystal kosher salt as “always perfect.”) As television turned chefs into celebrities, their fans began trying to emulate them at home.

At the same time, recipes, like the rest of media, were moving online, and their tone was changing. Older cookbooks, Morocco told me, assumed a lot of knowledge on the part of their readers: “Recipe language was very terse. They were not really holding your hand too much.” Online, recipe writers had unlimited space, a broader potential audience, and a business imperative to build a relationship with their readers. So their guidance became chattier and more descriptive, designed for a home cook who was eager to learn—and who could hold recipe developers more immediately accountable, yelling about bland soup or bad bakes in the comments section.

“Salt to taste,” which had for decades been a standard instruction in most savory recipes, gave way to specific measurements. But different salts have different densities, meaning a teaspoon of one brand can be recipe-ruiningly saltier than that of another. So recipe developers needed to be able to recommend a standard salt. Being chefs, they already liked kosher. In 2011, Bon Appétit, which was then becoming a major resource for Millennials teaching themselves how to cook, adopted Diamond Crystal as its house salt.

This is all a little funny. Restaurant chefs started using kosher precisely because it was easy to use without measuring—now home cooks are measuring it out by the teaspoon. And a movement that espoused seeking the ideal ingredients for every dish resulted in widespread adoption of a one-size-fits-all salt.

In doing so, modern cooking has inadvertently all but abandoned one of the most significant public-health advances in history. A few years ago, a 6-year-old girl showed up at a medical clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, her neck so swollen that it looked like she’d swallowed a grapefruit whole. After a series of tests, doctors figured it out: She was iodine-deficient. Her thyroid—the butterfly-shaped gland that is responsible for just about everything the body does, and which requires iodine to function—had swelled in an attempt to capture any microgram of iodine it could from her bloodstream.

For centuries, thyroid dysfunction was endemic; millions of people around the world suffered from slow heartbeats, weakness, muscle fatigue, sluggish metabolism, and brain fog. When, in 1924, American manufacturers introduced artificially iodized salts, it was a miracle, right there on the shelf in the grocery store. Within a few years, the thyroids of the developed world were working again.

Recently, however, doctors have started reporting more cases of iodine-deficient hypothyroidism—and our salt preferences may be at least partially to blame. Kosher salt, as you have probably guessed, does not contain iodine. Neither do most ultraprocessed foods, the main vehicle by which most people in this not-exactly-sodium-deficient country take in salt.

Iodine deficiency can be serious, but is eminently treatable. (Pregnant women should be particularly attentive to their iodine levels, the UCLA endocrinologist Angela Leung told me, because deficiency can result in birth defects.) The 21st-century rise in hypothyroidism might therefore be less a cause for alarm than a chance to rethink our contemporary salt orthodoxy. Kosher’s dominance, to hear Bitterman tell it, “doesn’t come out of magic or merit—it’s cookbook writers and chef culture, a weird confluence of circumstances brainwashing everyone at the same time.” What’s great for chefs may not be great for home cooks. Kosher salt isn’t inherently better, and in some cases may be worse.

I’ve now spent hours on the phone with salt connoisseurs—at one point, Bitterman earnestly described a certain type as “luscious” and “warm”—and have come around to the view that we should all be more open to using different salts for different purposes, in the same way that well-outfitted cooks might keep different types of olive oil on hand. Flaky fleur de sel is great for finishing dishes; flavored salt is perfect on popcorn. And for everyday cooking, iodized table salt is just as good as kosher—preferable, even, if you’re worried about your iodine levels. Sure, all the recipes now call for kosher salt, but a solution exists: Ignore the instructions and season intuitively. Like a real chef would.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Kosher Salt Is Actually Just Big Salt.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.

But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.

Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.

That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.

Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government job and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”

Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.

The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.

[Read: Fear of flying is different now]

When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.

At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.

“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”

The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement.  The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.

“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”

The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”

The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.

In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.

So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.

Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys have signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.

Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”

SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”

In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”

When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.

“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.

Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.

“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”

Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”

The vice presidency has long been the booby prize of American politics. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” America’s first vice president, John Adams, lamented to his wife in 1793. J. D. Vance has been in office for only 48 days, but he has already found a better use for the largely ceremonial post than many of his predecessors: posting constantly on social media.

Since being sworn in, Vance has opined more than 120 times on X, with some of his missives running hundreds of words long. He has engaged in detailed policy debates, promoted his political allies, and dunked on his critics. Watching the veep unfurl his latest novella on Elon Musk’s platform, many of his progressive critics have smirked: Doesn’t he have better things to do? But mocking Vance’s social-media habit misses its significance.

As the sidekick of a president who charts his own idiosyncratic course, the former senator from Ohio has few avenues for influencing policy and may simply be marking time until he can launch his own bid for the White House. Trump, having decamped to his personal Truth Social platform, has effectively ceded the online arena, and Vance—a New York Times best-selling author and Yale Law–trained debater—has been making the most of it. His posts provide a window into where the vice president thinks the country should go and how he plans to make sure that he is the one to lead it there.

Consider Vance’s careful choice of issues. Since inauguration, he has posted nearly two dozen times critiquing U.S. support for Ukraine, participating in extensive exchanges on the subject. He has never once mentioned Gaza. This is no accident. Cutting off Ukraine unites a large majority of Republican voters. Trump’s plan to “take over” Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is one of the president’s least popular proposals among his supporters.

Vance would surely defend Trump’s Gaza gambit if pressed in a live interview, but the beauty of social media is that he can choose which questions to answer. Trump’s benign neglect of both X and his running mate has allowed Vance to pick his spots. It also allows him to hone in on the worst arguments advanced by the opposition rather than defending the worst ones advanced by his boss and his allies. Where Trump uses social media solely as a one-way broadcast, Vance relishes mixing it up in public, not just posting but replying—often in order to skewer left-wing critics. In doing so, the vice president has flipped the script on anti-Trump media and exposed weaknesses among his cultured despisers.

[Read: The J. D. Vance I knew]

Last month, after Vance told the Munich Security Conference that “you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” the progressive media magnate Mehdi Hasan accused him of hypocrisy. “Hey @JDVance, I know you’re busy lecturing the Europeans on free speech,” he wrote on X, “but have you seen this?” Hasan appended a post about the Trump administration banning the Associated Press from the White House briefing room over its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage. This jibe was nothing new. Since 2016, many left-wing commentators have generated applause on social media by performatively pummeling various Trump officials for their progressive audience. But this time, Vance punched back.

“Yes dummy,” he replied, “I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!” The riposte quickly went viral, racking up nearly 50 million views, more than 15 times as many as Hasan’s original post.

The rapturous response from conservatives shouldn’t be surprising. Vance’s dunk was a perfect fusion of the poles of the pro-Trump camp—a “yes dummy” for the “own the libs” crowd and a debater’s quip afterward for the National Review set. (The vice president conveniently did not answer follow-up questions about Musk’s declaration that week that the makers of 60 Minutes deserved “a long prison sentence.”)

That Vance momentarily got the better of Hasan, himself a potent persuasive force, says less about Hasan than about the general flabbiness of left-liberal media’s approach to Trump. Faced with a shambolic first Trump administration—which didn’t expect to win, wasn’t prepared to make its case to the public, and had alienated many of the most capable mainstream Republicans—Democratic-aligned politicians and pundits have been playing on easy mode since 2016. Operating within the monocultures of academia and media, many of those on the center-left spent more time fending off attacks from their left than worrying about challenges from their right.

Today, the situation could not be more different. Trump has united the Republican Party behind him, and while his administration still has its substantial share of cranks, it also has the benefit of more effective spokespeople—not just Vance, but media-savvy figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and United Nations Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik. And with the information landscape no longer dominated by a few establishment outlets and channels, the administration is able to circumvent legacy media and use podcasts and platforms like X to amplify its message. The game has changed, and Trump’s critics will have to change with it, or get rolled by the likes of Vance.

But just because the rules of engagement have shifted doesn’t mean that Vance will end up the winner. Social media can just as easily delude its users as enlighten them. Whether left or right, internet-poisoned campaigns tend to lose because they convince political partisans marinating among the like-minded on X or Bluesky that their most polarizing positions are ascendant when they are actually alienating to many everyday voters. This is why campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality often self-destruct, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned the hard way in his presidential bid.

[Read: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]

Venturing too far into the Very Online vortex risks leaving behind the people who actually put Trump in office. Many of his voters have no investment in the MAGA universe and its culture-war obsessions; they just want a better economy and less immigration. A successful politician today needs to know how to use social media without being used by it—to appeal to their partisan base without being captured by it.

If anyone is up for this task, it’s Vance. The vice president is used to being the outlier in the room—whether as a conservative in liberal spaces like Yale Law, or as a hillbilly from Appalachia in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley. He has extensive experience making his case to diverse and often hostile audiences. Indeed, Vance’s meteoric rise from little-known law student to vice president is a master class in political persuasion.

First he ensnared Never Trump Republicans and bemused liberals searching for a Trump whisperer from the heartland to explain the 2016 election. Then he won over the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., who helped him secure the 2024 VP nod. He has played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage. Now Vance has set his sights on the Republican Party itself, using social media as a 21st-century bully pulpit to outmaneuver his conservative rivals and liberal critics, and unite the base behind his leadership.

None of this will matter if Trump 2.0 tanks and Vance is seen as an accomplice to national catastrophe. Precisely because he has so little authority, Vance’s fortunes are hostage to those who do. But if the administration completes its term without utterly discrediting itself, the country’s first vice president of social media will be well positioned for a promotion. Maybe all John Adams needed was an X account.