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How about the FAA or the EPA? I'm pretty sure someone creative could fish out a few other letters out of the soup to screw him over with.
Any regulatory action will be stayed by a friendly Texas circuit judge and then blocked by SCOTUS as it would be (a) trivially obviously politically motivated and (b) a 5-4 or 6-3 vote along ideological lines. They’re also federal agencies so Trump’s inevitable pardon will be more effective. The big risk would be state level enforcement but Musk moves the corporate registration to Texas so even California and NY are pretty limited and it’s likely things would go the way the anti-Trump cases did under Biden except Musk will be able to hole up in Texas while Trump wanted to be able to campaign everywhere and had a lot more assets under (ultimately) his name in NY.
I don’t think you actually need to do any of this for Musk. Flatter him and call him a genius and say you’re in favor of UBI and other stuff he supports and he’ll be fine with you. His politics have flipped before and they can again when convenient.
Why? Even under Trump Starship is grounded (don't know if this is still valid, but didn't see any news calling it off). A hostile administration could launch these sort of investigations more often, and slow-walk them, how would that be blocked and overturned as unconstitutional?
"More often" from a future FAA would stick out like a sore thumb. FAA investigations into SpaceX failures are already done as often as reasonable, out of a proper abundance of caution. A year ago they grounded Falcon briefly after a booster landing burn failure, not because there was any possible danger from that, but because seeing anything unexpected with a rocket engine at any point suggested the possibility of something unexpected happening in the future at an actually-dangerous point.
But this could be pretty damaging. IIRC that Falcon grounding only lasted days. The difficulty with slow-walking is that in these cases it's SpaceX itself doing the real investigation work and the FAA reviewing the findings when they're done, and it'd be hard to sell "we need 4 months to read what took you a month to discover and write" as legitimate. They'd have to go all-out and get a hostile legislator to change the system entirely, to sell "They're just investigating themselves!? We need our people doing the investigation if we're going to protect the American People!" Achieve that and you wouldn't even need to give instructions to slow-walk anything; friction and incentives would do it for you.
The more plausible failure mode is just that SpaceX writes a report, the FAA looks at it, and then says "more", rinse and repeat. That's a really common failure mode for environmental law, but the FAA (generally through DAR/DER) is pretty well-known for it, too.
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