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On Monday the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—have concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy.

Rather, the court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed.

To sue in federal court you need standing, and the bedrock of standing is injury—something “concrete and particularized” that is “actual or imminent.” The typical injury is financial or physical, but the court has long recognized the possibility of aesthetic injury, particularly in environmental cases. So, for example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the court held that the “desire to observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes,” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

There’s an ethereal quality to aesthetic injury, but that doesn’t make it vaporous. We can appreciate a landscape, or work of art, or historical battlefield, or public building with sustained passion and intensity, and its loss takes something valuable from us, whether it costs us money or not. That was the basis for standing in the ballroom lawsuit, and it’s difficult to see how it could be more concrete.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation brought the lawsuit. To sue as an organization, it had to put forward one member with standing in her own right. And in this case that was Alison Hoagland. Hoagland is not, as Trump sneered, some lady who happens to walk by. She is a professor of history and historic preservation, an authority on American architecture, and a Washington resident who goes to look at the White House because looking at it is, for her, the whole point.

The five-justice per curiam, or unsigned, opinion, did not purport to overrule the cases that say so. Rather, it pooh-poohed Hoagland’s felt harm, recasting her documented, decades-deep professional interest as “mere offense,” no different, in the majority’s telling, from “virtually every citizen” who wants “to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

The court carved off the environmental precedents on the ground that those plaintiffs did “more than” look: they fished, they swam, they hiked. In his dissent for four justices, Chief Justice John Roberts fairly demolished that argument, pointing out that the principal way anyone enjoys a historic building is precisely by looking at it, and that the court had misconceived Hoagland’s injury.

What the majority actually did by way of determining that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits was narrow aesthetic standing to the vanishing point. As of now, “I want to look at a crocodile” passes muster while “I want to look at the White House” does not. And since it’s hard to think of any prospective challenger to the ballroom who would not be relying on aesthetic injury, there is no clear path around the Court’s tacit reframing of the doctrine.

To grant the stay, the Supreme Court also needed to find that the administration would be irreparably injured if the stay weren’t granted.

The court’s first recognition of irreparable harm was the mere fact that the executive will was frustrated. That is blatant bootstrapping that just restates the court’s legal judgment, but it’s a move that has become routine for the conservative supermajority.

The court also credited an argument from the administration that the ballroom’s “height and mass” are “crucial” to shield the underground installation from “kinetic impacts,” lest engineers “dig impractically deep.”

But this second theory was a mid-litigation invention. Roberts’s dissent guts it in a single devastating footnote. It points out that the government had earlier told the district court the opposite—that its below-ground security work was driven by concerns having nothing to do with the ballroom above it. And the injunction never touched that work: It barred only the ballroom, leaving the government free to build the underground facility and whatever was needed to protect it.

In fact, the actual irreparable harm is plainly on the plaintiffs’ side of the ledger. With the court’s decision, the crews will return to 20-hour days, with the goal of building the project up to a point where it may be impossible to undo.

With the majority ducking the merits, Roberts’s dissent went to the heart of the case. Not surprisingly, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined without a word of their own, because the chief’s voice packed the most powerful punch.

Roberts’s opinion begins with the straight declaration that the ballroom is likely unlawful, in effect a raw power grab. Congress has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds in the District of Columbia without its express authorization, and it has given none. The two statutes the government waves around come nowhere near authorizing the president to raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom with hundreds of millions in outside money.

He concludes with the true stakes of the disputes, and the enormous social injury of the court’s casual dismissal on standing grounds. “The White House,” he writes, “is not just any building, and…Hoagland is not just any person.” And he saves the perfect quote from Winston Churchill for his final paragraph: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

That’s the real tragedy of the case, the point that eclipses standing doctrine and irreparable harm. Every court to consider the ballroom’s legality has found it likely unlawful. Four justices now say the same, and not one justice has written a word defending it. The five in the majority say only that they “do not pass upon” it, but that’s cold comfort when their ruling means that the unlawful project now resumes at deliberate breakneck speed.

It’s not simply the illegality. It’s vastly unpopular with the American people, the actual owners of the “people’s house.” It would destroy the neoclassical serenity of the most important public building in America. And it’s hideous.

The White House’s serene neoclassical design is the shape of democracy; Trump would convert it to a bloated monument to his own megalomania. Only a consummate and abject failure of all of government—a corrupt president, a pliable and quiescent Congress, and a cynical Supreme Court refusing to confront the real stakes of the case—could even make it possible. But that’s precisely what is now staring us in the face.

Meat is back.

Not that it ever really went anywhere—but for a few years around the turn of the decade, the centrality of meat in the American diet came under real scrutiny. A slew of highly publicized academic papers detailed the massive environmental toll of animal agriculture, including its outsize contribution to climate change. Plant-based burgers popped up on menus around the country, and oat milk became a coffee-shop staple. Greta Thunberg extolled the virtues of veganism, while conservatives wrung their hands about the Green New Deal taking away their hamburgers. American meat consumption, which had been growing for decades, dipped ever so slightly.

What a difference a few years, and a change in administration, can make. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services and a proudly ravenous meat eater, has turned the principles of the growing Make America Healthy Again movement into government policy: The Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, promoted to the public as “Eat Real Food,” enshrine a national obsession with consuming more protein and fewer processed foods. Meat (ideally red, usually beef) and milk (ideally whole fat, potentially raw) are now being lauded as saviors of the American diet.

It’s an expensive diet. Beef prices are skyrocketing as cattle herds have shrunk to their lowest level in 75 years, owing to drought, increased costs to ranchers, industry consolidation, and international competition. President Trump responded last week with a proclamation pausing tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of beef that will be sold to the U.S. at a 25 percent discount. Agricultural economists don’t expect the move to make a meaningful difference in the cost of a hamburger. Not that it matters. Americans are spending record amounts on meat and are projected to eat more meat than ever this year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meats and even plant-based milks are declining.

This is an unfortunate vibe shift. The case against meat has not weakened. It is still unhealthy to eat in excess, environmentally damaging to produce, and extremely profitable for the industrial farms and multinational conglomerates that make up Big Agriculture. Therein lies the contradiction at the heart of MAHA’s meat fixation: Eating more of it will only exacerbate the very problems that the movement purportedly wants to solve.

Meat is by far the most environmentally damaging part of the American diet. Most animals are raised on industrial farms, not on open pasture—and even still, livestock grazing accounts for about 85 percent of all American land. Livestock make up about half of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, or 5 percent of all national emissions, most of that coming from methane belched by cows and manure expelled by factory farms.

Now consider the damage caused by growing feed for livestock. Cropland for feed—mostly hay, corn, and soy—accounts for another 8 percent of all land, and more water is used to grow feed than for any other agricultural purpose. For instance, about a quarter of all water withdrawn from the Colorado River, which is facing historic lows, goes to alfalfa for cattle feed. Furthermore, growing vast amounts of feed crops requires the widespread use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers that often contaminate soil and drinking water.

Every year, close to 10 billion animals are slaughtered in the United States, most of them chickens. Ninety-nine percent of those chickens come from factory farms, as do close to 99 percent of pigs, and north of 75 percent of beef cattle are fattened for slaughter on industrial feedlots. This massive volume of production enables Americans to eat more meat per capita annually—about 225 pounds each, not counting seafood—than almost any other country on earth.

Given all of this, it’s odd to see meat arise as the dominant food choice of those ostensibly committed to improving our food system. The arguments in favor of meat tend to break down along three often overlapping appeals: purity, processing, and protein.

Proponents of meat, given pride of place in Health and Human Service’s new dietary guidelines and discussions of improving American agriculture, tend to trot out the idea that meat is as real as “real food” gets, associating it with small-scale ranching and “regenerative” grazing on bucolic farmscapes unsullied by agricultural industrialization. This is an old idea that has taken firm hold in food circles, from Michael Pollan through the Food Babe. Even food journalists get drawn into this frame, with The New York Times’ Kim Severson, writing about meat’s resurgence, casting it as a happy meeting between liberal farm-to-fork enthusiasts and the right-wing “‘don’t tread on me’ crowd, who prize family tradition and less-processed food—much of which they might grow or hunt themselves.”

But preindustrial meat is not what most Americans eat. It represents maybe 1 percent of the meat consumed in the country. And even if we were to somehow reorganize our food system to increase this sort of farming, there are hard limits to how much we could produce. A study that modeled land use requirements to meet our current demand for beef with entirely free-range cattle found that we would have the capacity to produce only 45 percent of our current supply. Meeting current demand for chicken with pasture-pecking birds would require 60 percent more land. In short, without factory farms there would be far less meat and it would be far more expensive.

If the MAHA movement were remotely coherent, it would push for this less-but-better meat vision. But simply calling for more meat inherently means calling for more factory farms. And that, in turn, runs directly counter to MAHA-aligned policies like taking on Big Ag and reducing agro-industrial pollution. Eating more meat means producing more meat, which in turn means more mass-produced cheap feed, factory farming, and industrialized slaughterhouses.

This is also the big blind spot for those who see meat as an alternative to so-called “ultra-processed food,” or UPF. Kennedy Jr. and many in MAHA-adjacent meatfluencer circles tout meat as an unprocessed alternative to the industrial slop they see as polluting American diets. The government’s new guidelines explicitly urge Americans away from processed food and toward meat. Lest this be dismissed as bro-science, this is also how Nova, the Brazilian food schema from which we get the idea of UPFs, classifies meat. Nova, which is shaping food policy from Brazil to Belgium to California, clusters foods into groups based on their level of processing, and deems any food that is produced using industrial processes or industrially produced additives as “ultra-processed.” The term creates an easy bogeyman and facile shorthands, such as RFK Jr.’s claim that products with ingredients “that I can’t pronounce” are dangerous (a lukewarm reheating of Pollan’s equally anti-intellectual suggestion, “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”).

Putting aside the debate over the actual validity of the term and its applicability to adjudicating the healthfulness of food, Nova and other definitions of “ultra-processing” start at the farm gate, when harvested food begins its journey from field to fork. Thus, soy beans processed and mixed with other ingredients like methylcellulose to make an Impossible Burger, or even some types of tofu, are branded as ultra-processed, as if they were nutritionally equivalent to Doritos. Meat, meanwhile, escapes scrutiny because schemas like Nova have nothing to say about the process of commodity production itself. A pig or chicken genetically modified to grow extremely fast and fed a steady diet of soybean meal and industrially produced feed additives like phytase will, when slaughtered, become meat that is considered “unprocessed.” So the production process at factory farms, where most U.S. meat comes from, is made to disappear with a definitional sleight of hand—and meat, arguably the most industrial of America’s major foods, emerges as somehow anti-industrial. This, in turn, conceals not just meat’s provenance but the fact that it is both far more environmentally harmful and likely less healthy than an “ultra-processed” plant-based alternative.

It’s all the more troubling, then, to see meat being touted as a health food. HHS’s guidelines have almost doubled the recommended daily intake of protein over its predecessors, and nutritional advice online is increasingly pivoting to describing meat as a nutritionally dense superfood. And yet, protein deficiency is not a generalized health risk in the U.S. The USDA’s Healthy Eating Index shows that Americans are not eating enough fruit, vegetables, and whole grains. Meanwhile, the average American male already eats as much protein as the new guidelines suggest (or about twice as much as the old guidelines did).

Not only is there no health rationale for urging Americans to eat more meat, but there is extensive evidence suggesting that they should eat less of it. This was the conclusion of the original committee of nutrition and public health experts gathered by the Biden administration to advise the government on revising the dietary guidelines. But the Trump administration ignored this advice and sidelined the committee, replacing it with an ad hoc one created by Kennedy that included experts with direct ties to the meat industry (and one who co-authored a paper downplaying the climate impact of meat). No wonder the new guidelines ignore the vast evidence of meat’s health risks. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called them “simply wrong and dangerous to the health of Americans,” and they’re now being challenged by a lawsuit filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

But if MAHA adherents’ arguments in favor of meat crumble under cross-examination, why have they proven so popular? The answer is politics—and more specifically, popularism. If there is one truly bipartisan activity in the United States, it’s eating meat. Doubling down on an existing practice but recasting it as healthy and socially responsible is a way to promise change without changing anything. It is also a way of subsuming the real hunger among the public for healthier eating by treating the status quo as desirable. When Michelle Obama urged Americans to eat more salad, conservatives raged against her and whined about government overreach because—if the Healthy Eating Index is to be believed—they probably weren’t eating much salad. When RFK Jr. tells them to eat meat, they cheer because they already are. This is the obvious political advantage of cheerleading for orthodoxy. It is extremely difficult and fraught to try to change Americans’ diets, and especially to reduce their meat consumption. It requires the building of permission structures, to use a term Barack Obama popularized: psychological scaffolds that allow people to change deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviors. MAHA’s push for meat doesn’t need permission structures; it just gives people permission to carry on.

And so we get fast food, one of the root causes of our dietary woes, being transformed by the right into a paragon of health—with a side of owning the libs. “MAHA meal,” conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted on X last week, along with a video of his family eating at Steak ’n Shake. “Seed oil free. Grass fed, grass finished beef. Beef tallow fries. Real milk milkshake.” As The Wall Street Journal noted this week, the restaurant chain has gone “full MAGA” by switching to grass-fed beef, cooking fries in beef tallow, and launching a “Protein Steakburger”—all spearheaded by its “chief MAHA officer,” who of course is a former HHS staffer under Trump.

But the bill will come due for all of us, in one way or another. If Kennedy and the MAHA movement are successful in convincing Americans to eat even more meat, it will not only cause more heart disease and diabetes, but necessarily lead to more factory farms, more cancer-causing pesticides, and more rivers polluted by runoff. That is the reality. The MAHA fantasy is just a road to the very future that MAHA claims to oppose, in which we’re all in poorer health and Big Ag is bigger than ever.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for its daily newsletter.

California’s mandate requiring later start times for middle and high schools is already yielding results, with students sleeping more, reporting better mental health and scoring higher math and English scores, according to a new study. 

The new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines the effects of Senate Bill 328, California’s statewide mandate for later school start times. The law, which went into effect in 2022, requires most middle schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. 

The study found that the new law increased the share of students sleeping at least eight hours per night by 13%, meeting the minimum recommended for adolescents by health experts. The largest jump was among boys. 

The study shows that “rest and sleep are incredibly important in the function of schools,” said Osea Giuntella, an author of the report. Although the short-term increase in sleep is moderate, it has led to significant improvements in mental health and academic outcomes, he said.

Giuntella, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who studies sleep and economics, said the study’s first-year results are consistent with previous research linking better sleep to improved student well-being and academic performance. The study used changes in teachers’ commute arrival times from the American Community Survey as a proxy for later school start times, comparing sleep and mental health data before and after SB 328 took effect in the 2022-23 school year and tracking academic gains from 2022 through 2025.

Gains in sleep, mental health, English and math 

Students reported experiencing better mental health since schools shifted to later start times, with boys reporting the largest reductions in sadness, hopelessness and suicidal ideation, and Hispanic students reporting the biggest drop in difficulties concentrating. 

Terra Ziporyn, executive director at nonprofit Start Schools Later and longtime advocate of later school start times, said SB 328 was a key part of California’s response to what schools have described as a student mental health crisis. 

Students in class at San Lorenzo High School. Credit: Florence Middleton for CalMatters

“The first step in addressing student mental health problems is to not create them in the first place,” Ziporyn said. “You can get a lot of counselors, but systematically depriving an entire adolescent population of adequate sleep is a surefire way to hurt their mental health.”

The study also found significant improvements in academic achievement, with eighth grade students making measurable gains in math and English, particularly among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students.

Giuntella, the study’s author, said the improvement in scores was likely “largely driven by the change in sleep” based on comparable studies where increased sleep led to higher GPAs. That’s also why Hispanic students, who are already less likely to get adequate sleep than white students due to lower family income and family and work responsibilities, improved their math and English scores the most, Giuntella said.

Parents struggle with new schedules

The state mandate is the only one in the nation.

“California set a huge precedent for the whole nation by saying, ‘We cannot leave what is essentially a public health decision in the hands of local districts,’ ” Ziproyn said. “It’s not just a negotiable school budget item that you trade off against anything else.”

But some parents have said later start times complicate work commutes, push back sports and extracurricular activities and lead to some students simply pushing back the time they go to bed. 

The study found that sports and extracurricular activities did start later after the change to later start times, but the changes were “marginal and not statistically significant,” Giuntella said. 

“And it’s true that, yes, students may even go to bed a little later than they were, but they are definitely sleeping in more in the morning,” she said. 

Guintella described later start times as just “one institutional factor” that may help address a complex sleep-deprivation problem, pointing to issues like the rise in nighttime screen use. 

‘Too hard and too expensive’ for some districts

Some school districts found the transition to later school start times “too hard and too expensive,” Ziporyn said. Ziporyn said district administrators could have received more guidance from the state Department of Education to explain the benefits of later start times, and involve families in finding solutions to logistical problems.

“[Schools] have to fully understand why this is being done and communicate it with confidence to the community that they’re doing the right thing for kids,” Ziporyn said. 

San Francisco Unified, for example, worked with operations experts at the Yale School of Management, Georgia Tech University and Northwestern University to redesign their bus routes in response to the change. With more than 120 schools and 18 different start times, the district generated about 1,000 new feasible bus schedules, which ended up saving the district about $5 million and with a majority of families and staff members satisfied with the transition to later start times, according to a report by Yale Insights.

But most schools in California did not have access to dedicated consultants to ease the transition, Ziporyn said. 

“California could have improved making these resources more readily available to the districts,” Ziporyn said. “Built into the law was that there was supposed to be help from the state Department of Education about getting this done, and building that community buy-in is part of it.” 

Giuntella said the state can improve its implementation of SB 328 by collecting statewide data on later school start times to “assess the impact of the reform.” In the meantime, schools can take from the study that later start times are “effective and powerful tools” for student outcomes.

“This happens often with some shock to individual and families’ habits, and so it also requires the ability to navigate this transition in a way that doesn’t backfire,” Giuntella said.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

The business of military contracting is booming in Southern California. 

The total value of defense contracts won by companies in Los Angeles County more than doubled in the last 10 years after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by CalMatters and The Markup. In the same period, the defense budget rose by about 19% in adjusted dollars.

The $15 billion in contracts won in L.A. County last year went largely to old-school defense contractors with headquarters elsewhere, like Boeing. But startups claimed a growing share of the pie, selling defense systems like low-cost missiles, drones, surveillance satellites, artificial intelligence tools and much more. In 2025, 10 startups in the LA area were crowned “unicorns,” becoming companies valued by investments at more than $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Most of those 10 companies were aerospace or defense businesses. 

In 2015, 14 of the top 100 defense contracts won in California went to businesses focused on drones or space, according to the CalMatters and Markup analysis. By 2025, that share was up to 21. The shift is similar if measured by dollars, from 13%to 18%. 

Details like whether you count obligations for where businesses are based or where the projects are launched all affect those numbers. By some counts the increases in contract dollars could be larger. 

The contracts have been kindled by a surge of venture capital. Private investment in aerospace and defense since 2008 has fueled massive gains, according to a report from The Aerospace Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit. 

But all the new money is now causing awkward political tensions. 

The war in Iran, which has depleted American munitions, is poised to drive demand even higher. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal includes a record-setting $1.5 trillion for the military. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has signed off on the earliest contracts for the “Golden Dome,” a proposal to build a missile-defense system above the United States that could eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Most of the Golden Dome winners are based in or have ties to the Southern California area. 

“You saw this huge rise in capital and now you’re seeing just much, much bigger government budgets for space,” said Sam Wilson, a researcher at the Aerospace Corporation. 

The collision of venture capital and military spending has alarmed some advocates, who see a frightening trend toward privatization and the risk of a space arms race. Even Congressional Democrats are pushing back against the spending.

That’s noteworthy because it has tended “to be a bipartisan, equal effort to increase the budget” of the military, said Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, which tracks defense spending. “I think we are maybe seeing the limits of that now.”

Despite the pushback, some of the congressional districts that saw the largest defense contract increases in recent years are beneficiaries of signature Trump-era projects. Many are in solidly blue Los Angeles County, and among the most Democrat-leaning districts in the country. 

California’s 36th Congressional District includes El Segundo, a high-tech defense hub outside Los Angeles. In the district’s 2024 House race, incumbent Democrat Ted Lieu took nearly 70% of the vote over a Republican challenger. The increase in defense contracts between 2015 and 2025 in that district alone was more than $3.3 billion.

Another district, California’s 43rd, is represented by Maxine Waters, who in 2021 signed on to the proposed No Militarization of Space Act, which described the Space Force as an unnecessary waste of resources and sought to abolish it.

Trump recently proposed to double the budget of the Space Force, another potential boon to the area. Meanwhile, Waters’ district has seen its share of obligated defense department spending grow over the past decade by more than $1.6 billion, or more than 500%, adjusted for inflation. Waters’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Seamus Daniels, who studies the defense budget at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the proposed $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget for fiscal year 2027 “would surpass the peak of defense spending during World War II.” 

The administration is seeking that money in place of traditional Democratic priorities, like healthcare funding, he points out. “The budget requests of the second Trump administration have been contentious because, while they have sought to increase defense spending dramatically, they’re also aiming to cut non-defense spending,” Daniels said.

Koshgarian said Democrats have largely been open to an increased defense budget, especially if it brings money to their congressional districts. But that may be changing.

“That tension is definitely real, even in left districts,” she said. “But I think we’re reaching a level of extremity now that that might be starting to flip.”

A new chapter

There’s no question California has become a major player in defense technology.

Every year, the Silicon Valley Defense Group, an industry nonprofit promoting military technology, releases a list of the top 100 tech-forward national security companies. When they charted the companies’ headquarters by state for 2026, they found that 47 were based in California, more than five times those in the number two state, Colorado. 

It wasn’t always that way for California. 

The state became a hub of manufacturing during World War II, building the planes en route to the Pacific Theater. During the Cold War, it was home to pioneering aerospace firms like Lockheed, Northrop, and Convair. But by the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gutted defense spending and consolidation stripped the region of its leadership, eventually sending Lockheed Martin’s headquarters to Maryland and Northrop Grumman’s to Virginia. Many were sounding the industry’s death knell. The nonprofit RAND Corporation noted that military aerospace sales peaked in 1987. They had declined by 32% just six years later.

The seeds of a comeback were sown when the Predator drone, built by General Atomics of San Diego, first took flight above the California desert in 1995. The craft, armed with Hellfire missiles, became the symbol of the War on Terror.

Then came the private investment surge, and an administration with new priorities.

As far back as the first months after Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, aerospace industry 

investors were celebrating massive stock gains. Government contracts have since turned defense companies like Costa Mesa-based Anduril into multi-billion-dollar operations.

Venture capital meets military dollars

Southern California likely benefits from the fact that the Space Force’s seed funding arm is based in El Segundo, where it decides where to send hundreds of millions of government dollars. The arm often chooses to fund companies in or around the small, seaside city, which has built buzz as ground zero for defense tech.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently went on tour to promote the “Arsenal of Freedom,” a plan to massively increase munitions building, he told the workers at a Long Beach company, Rocket Lab, that “dominance of space” was key to the military’s future. 

“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” he said.

The partnership between private venture dollars and public defense contracts often unfolds like this: First, a startup comes up with a business plan for a product or service with military applications. 

SpaceWERX, the El Segundo-based Space Force venture arm, selects some of these projects for early seed funding. Since 2021, SpaceWERX has awarded 380 contracts worth more than $461 million to businesses in California, more than any other state, SpaceWERX spokesperson Matthew Clouse said.

Private investors often follow on, seeing SpaceWERX money as a “demand signal,” said Arthur Grijalva, director of SpaceWERX. Billions have flowed into California-based companies in recent years this way. 

Some local politicians have spent years pushing for similar investment in local military applications. El Segundo Mayor Chris Pimentel said he and his team traveled north in the state to personally court financiers while dealing with an enormous business dip early in the pandemic.

“It really paid off with large dividends,” he said. “We started showing up and being in the room with some of the larger venture funds and saying, ‘we can make these things happen down here. We can build stuff.’”

“Agnostic of politics and agnostic of individual ideologies, our core belief is that this is where the future has been made historically,” he said, pointing to Southern California’s long aviation history. 

Some companies that take Defense Department contracts, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which started in the Los Angeles area, are now valued at billions. SpaceX’s recent initial public offering became, by far, the biggest IPO of all time in June. 

Other small space companies are rapidly building with government contracts. True Anomaly, a space defense company, was founded in Colorado in 2022 but now has its largest office in Long Beach. “When you’re building this type of company, it’s frankly somewhat of a necessity to have a footprint here,” said Chief Financial Officer Mark Seidel.

The company has worked on Space Force missions and was recently announced as a contractor for the Golden Dome project. In April, a $650 million funding round put the company at a valuation of more than $2 billion. 

The increasing spending, while bringing jobs to some parts of the country, continues to rile critics.

“We very much risk getting into a space arms race, where China invests more, so we invest more so China invests more and we invest more,” Koshgarian said. “Where does it stop?”

Data from usaspending.gov for Defense Department obligations to organizations listing a California address. Awards may be to California businesses for projects in another area. Download the data here. 

Mohamed Al Elew contributed data editing to this report.

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