Elon Musk and SpaceX are big winners in Donald J. Trump's 2026 spending plan.
President Trump has provided Musk's wish lists on both NASA and the Pentagon in a way that could drive billions of dollars in new business to Musk's space technology company if Congress signs the budget plan.
At the Pentagon, Trump is calling for a significant increase of nearly entirely 13%, thanks to the allocation of a Congressional Budget Settlement Plan, which is under consideration.
The jump occurs, but many other federal agencies will be cut, some of which are vast missile defense systems and space missions to Mars and the Moon, in order to overpay federal spending in two regions where SpaceX is profiting.
Trump proposed a Golden Dome defense system to track and kill missiles heading towards US targets that could have been sent by the US, Russia, North Korea or other rivals.
Pentagon officials say SpaceX is considered to be the top recipient of this new spending burst. This could generate billions of dollars in new contracts for the company.
That's because SpaceX is building rockets that can fire military payloads into orbit and satellite systems that can provide the monitoring and targeting tools needed for projects.
Trump's budget plan calls for a massive amount of new money, private but not exclusive, for “US space control to strengthen US national security.”
The enormous load of SpaceX's expected new business, which has already begun to become clear based on the changes in policy that Trump has made since January, has raised questions from Washington Democrats who have questioned whether Musk is cashing in on Trump's reelection and his significant contribution to his position as a top White House advisor.
SpaceX is already the largest recipient of pentagonal spending on existing military low-earth orbit communications systems, earning the biggest cuts in Pentagon Rocket launch contracts. Congress' approval of this plan to significantly increase spending is a big win for Musk and SpaceX.
The budget proposed by Trump calls for the 2026 Pentagon spending demand to be $113 billion more than this year. But Congress will increase completely from what Congress is considering through the 2025 fiscal year settlement plan, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former space industry executive who pointed out a footnote in Trump's plan.
NASA's budget faces an overall cut in Trump's plans, but there is an increase that aligns heavily with SpaceX's own company priorities.
The spending plan was followed by Musk's commercial rivals, asking NASA to phase out funding for the space launch system, and the Boeing-led rocket program, and Orion Astronaut Capsule, were built by Lockheed Martin, part of three planned flights to bring humans back to the moon.
Instead, Trump's budget calls for a “more cost-effective commercial system that supports the more ambitious subsequent moon missions,” an industry currently dominated by SpaceX. Industry executives said Friday that Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, who developed his own new rocket, could also be a major beneficiary of the shift.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have lunar landing systems that are contracted for use by NASA and have not targeted cuts so far.
“Their design is easier than SpaceX,” said Doug Robero, former NASA associate administrator of Human Exploration and Operations, who is also an adviser to the Trump administration, referring to Blue Origin's Moonlanding Plan.
NASA's budget calls for $1 billion in new spending to focus on its mission to MARS. He is already building a new rocket called Starship to try to implement this plan.
“We've had SpaceX bills ever,” said Mo Islam, co-founder of commercial space news website Payload. “There's no other way to see it. SpaceX is positioned as the main beneficiary of most of these budgetary movements.”
The NASA budget has several items that could reduce spending on SpaceX, such as a decrease in spending on the International Space Station, where SpaceX delivers both cargo and astronauts.
However, SpaceX still could have a winner. Recently, when he retired in 2030 he won a $843 million contract to “put the space station into orbit.” And Musk urged Trump to speed up his retirement date.
“The decision is up to the president, but my recommendation will be as soon as possible,” Musk wrote on social media platform X in February.
In 2024, SpaceX secured $3.8 billion in federal contracts. Most of them come from NASA and the Pentagon. The company has won a total of $18 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, according to a New York Times analysis of federal contract data.
Experts like Loverro have long argued that NASA is too focused on the budgetary and rear moon program called Artemis. That said, Robero said the new spending plan “will affect SpaceX in a very positive way.”
But Harrison, a former industry executive, said he would open SpaceX and the Trump administration to potential criticism.
“This is now contaminating all of this with alleged inappropriate consequences,” Harrison said. “Even if these are legitimate questions.”
