Stay on the ground
Maybe don’t take any plane trips for the next four years or so.
The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Probationary workers were targeted in late-night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.
The
impacted[fired] workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told The Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.A Transportation Department official told the AP late Monday that no air traffic controllers were affected by the cuts, and that the agency has “retained employees who perform critical safety functions.” In a follow-up query the agency said they would have to look into whether the radar, landing and navigational aid workers affected were considered to handle critical safety functions.
Oh we’ll look into that for you, would you like some tea or coffee?
Other FAA employees who were fired were working on an urgent and classified early warning radar system the Air Force had announced in 2023 for Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles, through a program that was in part funded by the Defense Department. It’s one of several programs that the FAA’s National Defense Program manages that involve radars providing longer-range detection around the country’s borders.
Due to the nature of their work, staff in that office typically provide an extensive knowledge transfer before retiring to make sure no institutional knowledge is lost, said Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, one of the employees in that branch who was terminated.
The Hawaii radar and the FAA National Defense Program office working on it are “about protecting national security,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “I don’t think they even knew what NDP does, they just thought, oh no big deal, he just works for the FAA.”
“This is about protecting national security, and I’m scared to death,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “And the American public should be scared too.”
Musk is just sending his underlings in to fire as many people as possible, without any attention to what the people do and why and what kind of hell will result from firing them all.
The employees were fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” Spero said, and the emails were “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address” — not a government email address. A copy of the termination email that was provided to the AP shows the sending address “ASK_AHR_EXEC_Orders@usfaa.mail.outlook.com.”
The firings hit the FAA as it is facing a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.
See, you don’t want that. You don’t want to get rid of the people who keep planes from crashing into each other. They serve a purpose.
Where are all the pro-defence department Republicans? Are they going to sit back and let Trump and Musk pave the way for another Pearl Harbour?
It seems so.
They might start speaking up if he ever looks politically weak but it might well be too late by then… Just waiting for the big national crisis that is the result of all this negligence or fails to be blunted because of it.
*Something* is definitely gonna happen… Too many possibilities to calculate just what that’ll be.
I think they’ve been understaffed ever since Reagan fired a lot of them for striking for better pay. Can’t have that; gotta underpay people who literally hold thousands of lives in their hands at all times.
Trump loves to shout ‘you’re fired’. Musk loves to think he is an efficiency guru. Between them, they will destroy the system…leaving most of the graft and corruption in place, since that benefits them, and they are involved in it up to the part in their hair (except Trump; he’s in it up to the top of his hairpiece).
Air travel might be a flash point.
In 2019 January (1st Trump administration) Republicans were playing their usual game of brinksmanship with the budget, and there was a government shutdown. It dragged on with seemingly no possible resolution; on day 32, Paul Krugman argued that for the shutdown to end,
https://x.com/paulkrugman/status/1087770780010799112
Three days later it was over. What changed? From Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_States_federal_government_shutdown
My walk to DCA used to take me past the VIP parking lot (since moved). So I could see all the congresspeople’s vehicles, from all the different states. Any issues with air travel are personal to congresspeople, so that’s going to get their attention. (Sadly, not too many of them are on medicaid.)