The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that builds and operates U.S. spy satellites, was founded in 1961, the year after the shooting-down of a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union made a shift to satellite reconnaissance imperative. NRO’s operations were ultra-secret, and the agency’s existence wasn’t declassified until 1992 (though a congressional report had carelessly mentioned it years earlier).
NRO’s emergence into the daylight of the post–Cold War world was awkward. The agency came under criticism in 1994 for excessive spending on its headquarters. I began reporting on NRO around that time, initially for the conservative magazine Insight on the News. I wrote an article that included interviews with three former directors. I didn’t get much info from the agency itself. I called an agency employee who was supposed to handle media relations, and the guy barked “N.R.O.!” as he picked up, as if enraged at having to answer the phone.
NRO’s had a reputation for technological excellence. A cliché was that the satellites could read license plates, which if an exaggeration was a modest one. I reviewed for the neocon journal Commentary a book titled The Hubble Wars, by Eric Chaisson, an astronomer who’d worked on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble wasn’t much different from one of NRO’s “Keyhole” satellites, just pointed outward to the universe rather than down at Earth. Chaisson claimed that NRO had tried to prevent NASA from making technical errors that resulted in astronauts having to go up to fix the malfunctioning telescope.
Working at Space.com, in 1999–2000, I called NRO again, this time to ask about the Future Imagery Architecture, a program it was undertaking for a new generation of spy satellites. The project turned out to be a costly debacle that was ultimately cancelled. I got someone on the phone who told me some minor info about it—I don’t remember what—and whatever she’d said was more than she was supposed to say, as my next conversation was with an irritated supervisor who refused to acknowledge anything.
Despite glitches, the value of NRO’s contributions to U.S. national security, and world peace, are formidable. NRO helped prevent the Cold War from turning into a hot war, by monitoring activity by the Soviet military and providing a basis for verification of arms-control agreements. It’s safe to assume NRO today provides invaluable data about any number of hostile states and groups. The agency remains secretive, trying to prevent adversaries from knowing the extent and deployment of U.S. satellite capacity. There’s legitimate debate as to what secrecy should surround NRO’s budget and staffing. But any declassification should be handled legally and with professional oversight.
Instead, such material was released by DOGE, seemingly through incompetence. This also raises the question of why DOGE had classified material in the first place.
The Huffington Post reported on February 14 that “Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency on its new website, raising bigger concerns about where Musk’s programmers got this information and what they are doing with it.” HuffPo noted that this was in contravention of DOGE’s own small print stating that intelligence agencies were excluded from the website’s feature allowing you to “Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” The material seemed to no longer be on DOGE’s website later that day. Still, it can be assumed that the information, reportedly in a category of “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals” (NOFORN), is now in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.
Musk’s company SpaceX is a contractor for NRO, with activities reportedly including a $1.8 billion contract. The connection between Space and NRO is a prime example of Musk’s role at DOGE posing a conflict of interest, in that it gives a contractor company power over the agency it does business with. Moreover, President Trump’s nominee as secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, as deputy director of NRO reportedly changed contract requirements to favor SpaceX in 2021, triggering scrutiny from an inspector-general.
Keith Cowing, who runs the website NASA Watch, notes that DOGE’s compilation of information about NASA’s workforce also gives Musk leverage over the civilian space agency, which too has extensive contracts with SpaceX, and that this may extend to his holding sensitive information about NASA employees.
I’ve raised concerns previously about Musk’s space activities and goals, including how his Starlink satellites have hampered astronomy, and how any Mars colony founded by him would operate like a “company town.” Still, with DOGE, Musk has taken his emerging role as space oligarch to a new level.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky