You’ll Never Believe This but Elon Musk Doesn’t Get to Pay TSA Workers’ Salaries

CBS news reported on Wednesday that Elon Musk’s pseudo-offer to pay the salaries of TSA workers affected by the ongoing partial government shutdown has been rejected by the Trump Administration.

I say “pseudo-offer,” because, as I already pointed out, he said he “would like to offer” to pay the salaries, a tortured phrasing that could have, perhaps, maybe, been construed as a signal that the “offer” might not be real.

Nonetheless, here are some headlines about Elon Musk’s statement:

• Fox Business: “Elon Musk offers to pay TSA workers’ salaries amid DHS budget standoff”
• Reuters: “Elon Musk offers to pay TSA salaries amid budget battle, airport lineups”
• Business Insider: “Elon Musk offers to pay the salaries of TSA agents as Trump threatens to replace them with ICE”

The President of the United States even responded publicly to the concept Musk floated, saying “I’d love it. I think it’s great.”

And apparently there was some internal discussion within the Trump White House about having Musk donate money to the general fund, CBS reports.

According to a 2016 explainer by the Niskanen Center, you can give money to the government via a quirky side door created in 1843 by Treasury Secretary John Spencer. It exists for “individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States,” and somehow managed to take in $47 million between 1996 and 2016.

However, CBS writes that an “outside individual is legally barred from paying government employees directly, according to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told CBS a slightly different story, saying the folks in the Trump Administration “greatly appreciate Elon’s generous offer,” but added that unfortunately it creates “legal challenges due to his involvement with federal government contracts.”

Elon Musk’s “involvement with federal government contracts,” to refresh your memory, could mean many things. His companies were slated to rake in $38 billion in government funds from 2020-2025 according to the Washington Post. But it should also be noted that the government department Musk ran last year cancelled billions of dollars in contracts—a different kind of “involvement.”

At any rate, when I wrote about this three days ago, I pointed out that when Elon Musk signals some dramatic act of generosity, there’s a tendency for very little, if anything, to actually materialize.

He has access to lawyers and knows the president personally. It would have been trivial for the richest man in the world to ask knowledgeable people to explore this plan privately, evaluate it for practicality, and then grandstand on social media about it only if it got the green light, and preferably after the wheels were already in motion.