a Better Bubble™
Our zoning code needs an upgrade. Its last overhaul was in 1947 by noted St. Louis villain Harland Bartholomew. It has density maximums and parking minimums. That is bass ackwards. Year after year we lament St. Louis’ population decline. I don’t recall anyone ever throwing a party to celebrate an increase in the number of […]
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Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”
So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.
Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)
Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.
These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.
“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”
Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
“They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. (Alyssa Schukar for ProPublica)For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.
When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)
Such victories may be rare in the next four years.
“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”
The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.
Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.
“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”
Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)
Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).
When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.
It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.
Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.
Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.
Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”
Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.
The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.
Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.
The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)
The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.
Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”
Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “
But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.
In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.
Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.
HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.
Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”
April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”
Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.
“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”
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In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.
Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.
Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.
In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.
In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.
Lamin Jabbi, first image, head of Gambia’s communications ministry, and Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia (Via the Facebook pages of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, and the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, Gambia)The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.
Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.
As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.
In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.
“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”
Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.
Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”
The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.
ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.
During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.
Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.
At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.
In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.
Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”
The headquarters of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, a Cabinet agency headed by Lamin Jabbi (Brett Murphy/ProPublica)Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.
Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.
Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.
“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.
In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”
Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.
A technician mounts a Starlink satellite dish on a house in Niamey, Niger. (Boureima Hama/AFP/Getty Images)As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.
Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.
The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.
An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.
In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.
It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.
Banjul, the capital of Gambia, during New Year’s celebrations (Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Images)Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.
Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.
Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.
The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.
Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.
After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.
The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.
In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.
The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”
The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.
The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.
That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.
“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.
“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”
In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.
Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”
Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)
The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”
In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.
In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”
In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.
Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.
Do you have information about Elon Musk’s businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.
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