Trump begins firing air traffic control staff amid 7 plane crashes

David Edwards
February 17, 2025 

RAW STORY

An American Airlines airplane lands near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in the aftermath of the collision of American Eagle flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the Potomac River, outside Washington, U.S., January 31, 2025. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

President Donald Trump's administration, guided by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), reportedly began firing staff responsible for air traffic control amid more than a half dozen recent airplane crashes.

The Associated Press reported that probationary employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began receiving emails on Friday night saying they would be terminated.

"The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing, and navigational aid maintenance," the AP reported after talking to one anonymous air traffic controller.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association was "analyzing the effect of the reported federal employee terminations on aviation safety, the national airspace system, and our members," the group said in a statement.

The firings come just days after a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet in Washington, D.C., killing over 60. Since then, at least six other plane crashes and wrecks have reportedly occurred

‘Stupid beyond belief’: Musk and Trump blasted as DOGE fires ‘hundreds’ from FAA

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
February 17, 2025 

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is reportedly firing hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees, according to multiple reports and the FAA workers’ union, even as fatal plane crashes continue to mount under President Donald Trump’s administration — including one as recently as Saturday.

“The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press,” the AP reported. The firings also come as the FAA is without a Senate-confirmed administrator, after Musk called for him to resign. In 2023, Michael Whitaker had been confirmed unanimously, 98-0.

The terminations of what are called “probationary” employees can include not only employees hired within the past year, but also long-term employees who have been recently promoted. Air traffic controllers and other employees are a critical segment of the federal government. The FAA’s hiring practices are rigorous and require tremendous training, as a former Federal Aviation Administration official said recently after President Trump strongly suggested the deadly mid-air crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport might have been the result of “DEI” hiring.

CNN, which first reported DOGE’s mass firings had now hit the FAA, noted that the “exact number of firings is not yet known, but the head of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, AFL-CIO, said that ‘several hundred’ workers started getting firing notices on Friday — and that they could even be barred from FAA facilities Tuesday after the federal holiday.”

“The FAA’s system that distributes critical flight safety alerts to pilots failed just days after the crash and forced the agency to rely on a backup system.”

There have been at least six fatal aviation incidents since Donald Trump became president, according to news reports and a search of the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) database:

January 25, 2025: Charlottesville, VA
January 29, 2025: Potomac River Mid-Air Collision
January 31, 2025: Med Jets Flight 056 Crash (Philadelphia)
February 6, 2025: Bering Air Flight 445 Crash (Alaska)
February 10, 2025: Private Jet Crash in Scottsdale, Arizona
February 15, 2025: Small Plane Crash Near Covington, Georgia


That last crash came “just hours after ‘hundreds’ of pink slips were reportedly handed out at the agency,” The Daily Beast reported.

“Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs,” said David Spero, national president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) told CNN. “To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”

Critics are blasting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

“No president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,” charged U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) on Monday.

President Trump, meanwhile, amid the firings, on Sunday took a “taxpayer-funded Daytona 500 joyride” at a rained-out NASCAR race “as he guts [the] federal workforce,” The Independent, a UK-based news site, reported.

Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Monday morning asked: “The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?”

U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, blasted the FAA firings:

“Mass firings of FAA workers – at a time when they already have serious staffing problems – would be dangerous at any time. Musk and Trump doing this weeks after the deadliest crash in years is stupid beyond belief.”

Professor of Public Policy Don Moynihan charged, “even after a bunch of accidents that highlighted FAA staffing shortages they still went ahead and fired FAA staff. They don’t know what they are doing.”

“You might have noticed that since Trump became President a number of aviation fatalities have occurred,” Moynihan wrote at “Can We Still Govern?”

“This happened after Musk pushed the head of the Federal Aviation Administration to resign, and Trump fired its safety advisory board. This likely had little direct effect on the crash at Reagan airport, but the crash highlighted staffing shortages, causing the Trump administration to tell FAA employees they could no longer apply for deferred resignation offer they had received days earlier. Safety first, it seemed,” he explained. “FAA employees therefore had some reason to believe that they would be exempt from the purge of probationary employees, but this is not the case.”

Jason King, a now-former FAA employee and disabled veteran who was laid off on Friday, told WUSA, “my unit directly with the FAA is directly involved with safety.”

Musk sends SpaceX team to visit key U.S. air traffic command center

Agence France-Presse
February 17, 2025 

Elon Musk, seen here in the Oval Office on February 11 (Jim WATSON/AFP)

by Sarah TITTERTON

A team from Elon Musk's SpaceX was set to visit the command center of the U.S. federal aviation regulator on Monday with a brief for suggesting safety improvements in the wake of a deadly crash in Washington last month.

The visit, announced on Sunday by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, has raised some eyebrows given the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has investigated and fined SpaceX on numerous occasions -– sometimes over safety issues.

US President Donald Trump, who has tapped top ally and donor Musk to slash the size of the federal government, has taken particular aim at the FAA over its hiring policies.

"America deserves safe, state-of-the-art air travel, and President Trump has ordered that I deliver a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world," Duffy said.

He added that SpaceX staff will take a "firsthand look" around when they visit the Air Traffic Control System Command Center, which works to balance demand for flights in the United States with the capacity to handle them.

It is also home to a team that tracks data about commercial space launches and re-entries and the status of various space missions, according to its website.

"The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter," said Musk, whose federal cost-cutting drive has raised concerns about conflicts of interest with his companies, several of which -- such as SpaceX -- hold major government contracts.

"SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer," he wrote on social platform X, which he also owns.

An aviation safety specialists union said that the Trump administration had begun firing "hundreds" of FAA employees over the long holiday weekend.

- 'Draconian' -

Trump has tapped billionaire Musk to wage a scorched earth campaign on the federal government, slashing workers and cutting programs -- such as aid to the world's poorest countries -- that he says do not align with his America First policies.


The president has accused the FAA of prioritizing "diversity, equity and inclusion" hiring policies -- meant to combat racism and other forms of discrimination -- over safety and efficiency.

"Several hundred" FAA employees began receiving notices that they had been fired late Friday, according to David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union.

"This draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin," Spero warned in a statement.

"Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency's mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety."

He said the "hastily made" decision was "especially unconscionable" in the aftermath of the deadly crash last month.

The accident at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport saw 67 people killed as an army helicopter collided with a passenger jet coming in for landing.


It was the deadliest air disaster in the United States in two decades.

Trump has also, repeatedly and without evidence, blamed the Washington crash on DEI programs.

Flight safety experts investigating the crash have said that faulty instruments and communication problems may have been behind the disaster.


© Agence France-Presse