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.
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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.
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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.”