Democrats demand answers on Grok’s use in government; Starlink outage impacted Starshield services for militry users

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the General Services Administration on Friday demanding more information about how the agency is using Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by Elon Musk’s xAI. The correspondence comes after FedScoop reporting earlier this month revealed that government coders at GSA seemed to be looking at integrating Grok into their artificial intelligence work. Other sources told FedScoop that Grok had recently been approved for integration as an option into the GSAi app, a platform the agency has built to help federal workers access various generative AI models. Four days after the publication of FedScoop’s story, xAI officially announced a “Grok for Government” service and confirmed that the company had been working to make its product available through GSA. As a result, Grok said ”every federal government department, agency, or office” could now access the company’s tools. xAI also announced a $200 million Defense Department contract. The federal government’s interest in using Grok — which recently espoused antisemitic and pro-Hitler content — has received pushback from Democrats. A group of Jewish Democrats recently wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about their concerns with the tool. Democrats in the House AI Caucus have also raised issues with the use of Grok, as has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who condemned the Pentagon contract on the chamber’s floor. But the latest letter, obtained by FedScoop, demands more information on the GSA’s work with Grok. The letter was addressed to Stephen Ehikian, the deputy GSA administrator who led the agency on an acting basis until earlier this week, and signed by Reps. Robert Garcia of California and Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, the current and former ranking members of the committee, respectively. An outage last week of Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, did have an impact on some services in the federal government. While several civilian federal agencies told FedScoop that the service interruption didn’t disrupt operations, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that Starshield, the military-focused communications service on the Starlink network, was taken offline during the outage. “The Space Systems Command Commercial SATCOM Communications Office procures Starshield Global Access services over the Starlink Satellites/network,” a spokesperson for Space Systems Command told FedScoop. The spokesperson continued: “As such, the global outage did affect CSCO customers for the entire duration of the outage (~2.5hrs for most users). Services had a partial restoration midway through the outage and a complete restoration by the stated end time.” Defense customers are currently able to access Starshield through the Space Force, among other procurement mechanisms, SpaceX’s website states. SpaceX says Starshield is for “national defense use cases” while Starlink “is not intended for any military end-uses or end-users.” Several branches of the U.S. military are currently testing or using Starshield, including the Air Force and the Navy. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard told FedScoop earlier this month that the agency began installing both Starlink and Starshield back in 2023. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.