President Donald Trump fired or pushed out some of the relevant officials who would otherwise be responsible for looking into a collision between a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington, D.C.
The Federal Aviation Administration currently has no Senate-confirmed leader after top administrator Michael Whitaker was forced out under pressure from Elon Musk, who had demanded his resignation in September for proposing fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX over safety concerns, reported The Daily Beast.
“The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts," Musk posted Sept. 17 on his X platform.
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Aviation industry veteran Chris Rocheleau was sworn as deputy FAA administrator on Jan. 21, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in, and Whitaker resigned one year into his five-year term, so Rocheleau is currently in charge of responding to the worst air disaster since at least 2009.
“The United States is the safest and most complex airspace in the world, and that is because of your commitment to the safety of the flying public,” Whitaker wrote in an email to FAA employees when he announced his resignation in December.
Musk has complained that Whitaker was blocking his goal of sending humans to Mars.
“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” the tech mogul tweeted at an Australian YouTuber who says the FAA “should not exist."
Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee the day after taking office, saying that the Department of Homeland Security was eliminating the membership of all advisory committees to eliminate the purported misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”
The aviation security committee was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, so it technically still exists but won't have any members to carry out its responsibilities to oversee safety issues at airlines and airports.
Before the newly inaugurated president reportedly fired them, the panel included representatives from airlines, major unions and members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing, and the vast majority of their recommendations for safety measures have been adopted over the years.
“I naively thought, ‘oh they’re not going to do anything in the new administration, to put security at risk — aviation security at risk,’ but I’m not so sure,” said Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband was killed in the bombing and served on the committee, eight days before the collision that killed 67 people in both aircraft.
The Trump administration also sent an email this week to 2.3 million federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, which is now packed with Musk allies and loyalists, asking them to commit to the MAGA mission or accept a buyout.
Air traffic controllers were among the millions of government workers who received the email, which used similar language to a message sent to Twitter employees when Musk took over in fall 2022, even though the FAA has already been trying to manage a persistent shortage of those crucial aviation safety workers.
The investigation into the collision will be managed by the independent National Transportation Safety Board, which is chaired by Jennifer Homendy – who has also clashed with Musk over the safety of self-driving software in his Tesla vehicles.