On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history.... But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.
... many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency.
... SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk [is deploying] equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.
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The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.
The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety.
... Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.”
... Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.