Trump’s War on Satellite Imaging Data

The White House is redefining how—and if—satellite imagery is collected and used, with potentially devastating consequences.

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If you open Google Earth and zoom in on the Gaza Strip, it may be difficult at first to detect anything amiss. But focus in on neighborhoods, blocks, or individual buildings, and the destruction on the ground becomes readily apparent. Clouds of smoke rise from the earth. Craters litter the landscape where there were once refugee camps. The ground is dark—gray from the build-up of concrete and metal from structures reduced to rubble. 

Satellite imagery has captured scars on Earth’s surface since at least the 1960s. The technology has helped to identify and document the extent of devastating military campaigns across the world, as well as the effects of environmental disasters. But the Trump Administration’s foreign and domestic policies could deal a blow to the availability of up-to-date, high quality global imaging as it moves to decrease funding for public institutions conducting satellite research. In January, The New York Times reported that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had identified more than $1 billion in NASA funding for potential cuts, $120 million of which is currently devoted to “space operations” and “space technology.” These programs help to map the Earth’s surface in great detail, which Google and other companies then use for global mapping services.

Access to satellite imaging can play a key role in international conflict, as was seen when the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) briefly suspended satellite imaging access to Ukrainian accounts registered with Maxar Technologies’ Global Enhanced GEOINT Data (GEGD) service on March 7. The decision was part of a broad order by President Donald Trump to cut off U.S. intelligence to the country shortly after a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about U.S. support for Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia devolved into shouting and accusations of ingratitude from Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. The order stripped Ukrainian accounts of permission to use newly collected satellite images—which are difficult for civilians to access due to their cost—leaving the country’s armed forces and emergency services unable to see Russian troops’ movements or Ukrainians’ medical and military needs. 

Maxar Technologies, a private satellite imagery firm based in Colorado that has provided data to Ukrainian consumers for years, quickly complied with Trump’s order. “Maxar has contracts with the U.S. government and dozens of allied and partner nations around the world to provide satellite imagery and other geospatial data,” the company announced on X. “We take our contractual commitments very seriously.” Maxar restored Ukrainian access to its data on March 12, according to The Kyiv Independent, following a meeting between U.S. and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia. 

Though short-lived, the incident revealed just how dangerous losing access to such data can be. When a Russian strike on Dobropillya in eastern Ukraine killed at least eleven people on the same day that Trump suspended satellite data, the lack of satellite data access left Ukrainian emergency services unable to adequately assess the damage and prepare a humanitarian response. 

This is far from the first instance in which satellite imagery restrictions have had significant geopolitical consequences. For more than two decades, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA), a 1997 addition to the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, limited the United States from collecting satellite data of Israel and Palestine at less than two meters ground sample distance (GSD), consistent with commercially available imagery at the time. In 2020, the amendment was updated to allow for imaging up to a more precise 0.4 meters GSD. This was not an effort to lift the restrictions—it simply maintained consistency with the amendment’s direction that data be “no more detailed or precise than satellite imagery of Israel that is available from commercial sources.” The KBA’s limitations obscured information about Israeli settler expansion, territorial disputes, and home demolitions in the West Bank and Gaza.

Satellite data is one part of a multi-pronged approach that conflict and climate researchers use to assess on-the-ground damage. “Much more geospatial information (or map data) can actually be retrieved from mapping on the ground,” Raiza Pilatowsky Gruner, senior communications manager at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), wrote in an email to The Progressive. “However, satellite images allow basic map data to be added much faster and, crucially, from anywhere.” When deadlines are tight or resources don’t allow for in-person research, images captured by satellites provide much needed information about situations that often require swift action.

For example, images from the early months of Israel’s war on Gaza reveal glaring examples of conflict littering the landscape, which the United Nations used to document “the widespread destruction and highlight the affected population’s need for support.” The damage in Gaza is clear even on Google Earth. Three enormous black plumes form a near-perfect line in the north-central region of the enclave, just south of Gaza City. At the base of each is a building struck by an Israeli missile, though the full extent of the damage is obscured by the cover of smoke. Google’s data attribution places the imagery between October 30 and November 24, 2023—one of the heaviest periods of Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip since the war’s beginning after October 7. By that December, the Palestinian death toll had already reached at least 15,000 people.

Using more recent data, a team of researchers from universities in the United States and Sweden used satellite imagery to investigate the impact of Israeli bombardment on Gaza’s farmland. They found that by September 2024, between 64 and 70 percent of tree crop fields and more than 4,000 greenhouses across the Gaza Strip had been damaged. The harm was especially acute in Gaza City, where 90 percent of tree crop fields and 100 percent of greenhouses had been destroyed.

Paying attention to agricultural damage is crucial when monitoring humanitarian situations in war zones—especially those such as Gaza that are cut off from the outside world, says Jamon Van Den Hoek, associate professor of geography at Oregon State University and contributor to the research on Gazan farmland. “We need to take into account the fact that relationships we see manifest in the land through agricultural change are really important parts of the story regarding the impacts of conflict in the short and long term,” Van Den Hoek tells The Progressive. Photos from above help to capture that damage in great detail.

Examining natural devastation goes hand in hand with researching conflicts. According to Van Den Hoek, the destruction of land is deeply tied to the violence that causes it, and vice versa. By investigating environmental evidence, researchers are able to piece together how conflicts play out. “We can’t decouple the environment and conflict,” Van Den Hoek says. “Everything is so tethered.”

Many such examples of natural ruin exposing evidence of conflict present themselves in humanitarian work. A 2017 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on the Rohingya Genocide used DigitalGlobe imagery from villages in northwest Myanmar to corroborate reports of military massacres in Rakhine State. Before-and-after images show individual homes and entire villages, where Rohingya Muslims lived and worked, razed to the ground. “The satellite imagery shows what the Burmese army denies: that Rohingya villages continue to be destroyed,” Brad Adams, the Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) until 2022, wrote in the report. The analysis of aerial photos led HRW to the critical conclusion that the Burmese government’s “pledges to ensure the safety of returning Rohingya” could not be trusted. 

If HRW did not have access to DigitalGlobe imagery—a service operated by Maxar Technologies—such research might not have been possible. HOT also uses data from Maxar, alongside imagery provided by Microsoft and Esri, both of which are based in the United States and contract with the federal government.

“If access to satellite imagery was lost, mapping efforts would have to revert to mapping on the ground only,” Pilatowsky Gruner says. “This would likely decrease the mapping rate by 90 percent or more, meaning that unmapped areas of the world would remain unmapped for longer, and areas that are in need of being updated due to urban expansion will remain outdated for much longer.”

Alongside global conflict research, disaster relief efforts in the United States could be affected by the Trump Administration’s budget cuts. As devastating wildfires raged through southern California earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) relied on satellite image collection to track their paths. The satellite systems that NOAA operates are a collaborative effort between the agency and NASA—and both agencies face mass layoffs and funding cuts under the Trump Administration.

According to Pilatowsky Gruner, on an international level, “these cuts could mean a weakened capacity to work on preparedness and anticipatory action in low and middle-income countries, which, coupled with more frequent and more intense climate [disasters], subsequently could exacerbate post-disaster impacts.”

But the problem runs deeper than funding and staffing. Van Den Hoek views the mindset of the current Trump Administration as one that is primarily defense-focused, concerning itself with war without giving the same attention to the peace that hopefully follows.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has claimed to be seeking peace in Ukraine, but “this is a bit at odds with how we see the Defense Department orienting around their concept of conflict, which is one of warfighting,” Van Den Hoek says. Meanwhile, he continues, satellite imaging has made clear that “there are large-scale environmental remediation efforts that are needed across the front lines [of Ukraine],” in which the hawkish Trump Administration has taken little interest.

Cutting the United States off from the rest of the world—through slashes to foreign aid and restrictions on satellite data—may make it seem as if the country is removed from conflict, but it threatens to endanger the country in the future.

“If we choose not to confront [global conflicts], the implications will come back in one way or another,” Van Den Hoek warns. And for those currently living through global conflicts, the impacts will be immediate.