Tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk’s two companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have submitted letters lobbying the U.S. trade representative on Trump government tariff policies.
As reported by CNBC, the two companies had different letters for U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. The electric vehicle producer Tesla cautioned of the negative impact on its bottom line from tariffs and from duties put by other nations on U.S.-made products in retaliation for those tariffs.
Meanwhile, SpaceX complains that operating expenses for its Starlink internet satellite service are raised by trade barriers abroad, while foreign competitors experience no such costs in the United States.
The notes come as Musk leads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a step to slash federal government spending and employee headcount at the direction of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Trump is imposing stiff tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, with China and Canada hitting back with retaliatory tariffs.
There have been more than 700 letters received by the trade representative’s office in reaction to an invitation for a public statement on “unfair trade practices by other countries.” The responses are posted on a public docket.
Tesla, in its unsigned note to Greer, urged him “to consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices.” “While Tesla recognizes and supports the importance of fair trade, the assessment undertaken by USTR of potential actions to rectify unfair trade should also take into account exports from the United States,” stated the letter, which was written by Tesla’s associate general counsel Miriam Eqab.
“U.S. exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to U.S. trade actions.” The company noted that “Past U.S. special tariff actions have thus (1) increased costs to Tesla for vehicles manufactured in the United States, and (2) increased costs for those same vehicles when exported from the United States, resulting in less competitive international marketplace for U.S. manufacturers.”
“USTR should investigate ways to avoid these pitfalls in future action,”
the letter stated.
SpaceX, in its letter to Greer, stated that it “faces a range of regulatory complexities and trade barriers in every country that the U.S. Government should seek to address in order to support continued U.S. leadership in the space domain.”
The letter reported that the business must pay foreign governments for access to spectrum and import duties for its Starlink satellite internet tools, and other costs that “substantially increase the cost of operating in these countries — artificially.”
“The import duties paid in a handful of countries represent a significant cost increase for Starlink products in those countries, despite the United States having essentially no duties on similar foreign products that are imported into the United States to serve customers here,”
noted Mat Dunn, SpaceX’s senior director of global business and government affairs, in the letter.
“As President Trump has noted with other sectors, this is a significant disadvantage to U.S. companies,”
Dunn noted.
