On Feb. 4, 2025, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, claimed Starlink, a telecommunications division of billionaire Elon Musk's space technology company, SpaceX, received "millions of dollars" from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's humanitarian aid department.
Welch said this on the Senate floor amid efforts by Musk — head of the Department of Government Efficiency — to dismantle USAID. His Feb. 6 X post of his speech, as of this writing, has more than 980,000 views, 34,000 likes and 10,000 reposts.
Elon Musk didn't have any issue with USAID when it gave millions of dollars to his company Starlink.
But now it's a "criminal organization?" pic.twitter.com/2WryeQtOjc— Senator Peter Welch (@SenPeterWelch) February 6, 2025
Welch's team also posted his speech on Threads, where it had received more than 15,000 likes as of this writing. People reposted his speech on other platforms such as Bluesky and Facebook (archived). Posts on X and Bluesky made similar claims.
It is true that USAID spent around $500,000 on Starlink products and services and was slated to spend at least $1 million. However, the money spent on Starlink flowed through third-party contractors first, and these contracts were not fully paid out at the time of this writing. USAID terminated the only publicly available contract it had with SpaceX for Starlink products. The Washington Post (archived) also reported that it obtained internal documents showing that USAID paid Starlink $3 million for devices and transportation to Ukraine, but Snopes could not independently verify this reporting.
Snopes asked Welch's office for the source of his claim. His spokesperson Aaron White directed us to the Washington Post story. White did has not yet responded to further questions about whether the senator had access to the documents reported on by the Post. SpaceX did not immediately return a request for comment.
USAID's public contracts with Starlink
According to a search of USAspending.gov, the government's "official open data source of federal spending information," USAID has awarded contracts to three different companies to procure Starlink products, totaling about $1 million.
However, only one of those contracts was awarded directly to SpaceX, Starlink's parent company, and USAID itself appears to have actually spent
The first award was $942,590.60 for "a new Starlink procurement," paid to Standard-Blazar — a third-party contractor that acts as an intermediary between manufacturers and state and federal government. The contract began May 8, 2024. Based on the USAspending.gov page, only $471,043 has been paid out to date, with a planned end date of May 7, 2026. It's unclear whether the contract will continue given President Donald Trump and Musk's efforts to dismantle USAID.
The second award was for "Starlink high performance kits and subscriptions" in the amount of $33,902.40 and began Sep. 30, 2023 — however, at least $20,341.44 of that award comes from Zimbabwe's and South Africa's contributions, not American taxpayers' dollars. The remaining amount comes from "M/CIO," presumably a reference to USAID's chief information officer. That award, which is to a third-party contractor called CounterTrade Products, could potentially increase to $46,789 with a planned end date of Sep. 29, 2025.
The third award was originally meant to "purchase Starlink equipment and services per attached quote in the amount of $56,800" on Sept. 1, 2023. However, the transaction history shows the Starlink purchase was terminated on Sept. 9, 2023, due to "convenience" and Starlink either returned the money or USAID never sent it.
The business magazine Forbes posted a story on Feb. 3, 2025, with the headline: "USAID Spent $1 Million On Elon Musk's Starlink Terminals In The Last Year." Snopes reached out to the article's author, Thomas Brewster, on Feb. 7 to ask whether he story used USAspending.gov contracts as his source. Brewster confirmed that he did and corrected the story's headline on Feb. 8 (archived) to read: "USAID Signed Off On $1 Million In Contracts For Elon Musk's Starlink Terminals In The Last Year."
Other reporting on USAID contracts with Starlink
On April 8, 2022, amid a USAID announcement that Starlink partnered with the agency to donate terminals — devices that connect users to SpaceX's satellite internet system — to Ukraine, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. was "quietly paying millions to send Starlink terminals to Ukraine, contrary to SpaceX claims."
The article appeared in the Post's Technology 202 newsletter, written by tech policy reporter Cristiano Lima-Strong with research from Aaron Schaffer.
The story cites documents obtained by the newsletter, language reporters often use when referencing documents leaked by anonymous sources. According to the Post story, USAID paid $3 million to SpaceX for Starlink terminals to Ukraine:
USAID agreed to purchase closer to 1,500 standard Starlink terminals for $1,500 apiece and to pay an additional $800,000 for transportation costs, documents show, adding up to over $3 million in taxpayer dollars paid to SpaceX for the equipment sent to Ukraine.
This contract does not appear on the USAspending.gov website, but it's possible that it falls under "information that may compromise national security," which USAspending.gov does not make publicly available. The Post also notes its reporting contradicts SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell's reported comments, given that she told CNBC, "I don't think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals to
As first reported by the Post, the original version of the USAID Starlink deal announcement said the agency agreed to pay for 1,333 Starlink terminals, with SpaceX donating 3,667 additional terminals, and the donation was "valued at roughly $10 million." But the agency later changed its statement to simply say that USAID "has delivered 5,000 Starlink Terminals to the Government of Ukraine through a public-private partnership with the American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX."
The Post reported that USAID spokesperson Rebecca Chalif later said in a statement that the "delivery of Starlink terminals were made possible by a range of stakeholders, whose combined contributions valued over $15 million and facilitated the procurement, international flights, ground transportation, and satellite Internet service of 5,000 Starlink terminals." According to the Post, the agency declined to say how much USAID funding went to SpaceX for the terminals.
While the news release suggests USAID may have paid for some of the terminals, Snopes cannot definitively prove that without access to the other documents obtained by the Post. We reached out to the reporters on this story. Lima-Strong told Snopes in an email that they couldn't share anything more about the documents "beyond what's in the story," but again noted the USAID news releases: "USAID confirmed at the time they had bought a large portion of the