Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to ‘improve Wi-Fi’?

The White House is working to “improve Wi-Fi connectivity,” according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. According to The New York Times, it’s using Starlink to address the issue, which White House officials blame on the property’s spotty cell service and “overtaxed” Wi-Fi infrastructure. Huh. Giving Leavitt the benefit of the doubt, I’ll grant that you can connect to Starlink terminals, like the Starlink Mini we reviewed, directly over Wi-Fi. But that’s apparently not what’s happening here, despite the efforts of a SpaceX security engineer named Chris Stanley, who the Times says “went to the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex to explore installing Starlink there,” only to trip a Secret Service alarm. Instead, the outlet writes that the White House is having its Starlink service piped from a government data center miles from the compound. Let’s set aside the obvious conflict of interest and ethics questions at play here—Elon Musk, who owns Starlink parent company SpaceX, has seemed to have his hand on the Executive Branch’s till a lot since Trump took over as President. We can even skip over the security implications. As a practical matter alone, there’s no obvious reason to add another internet service provider in order to improve Wi-Fi coverage, especially one that the FCC said less than two years ago didn’t “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” required for rural broadband funding.