On January 29, the country’s recent spotless record on air safety came to an abrupt end. The United States hadn’t experienced a fatal airplane crash involving a major airline in 15 years, the longest stretch ever recorded. Then, an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines plane over Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved.
While the investigation into the exact causes of the crash is still ongoing, it’s already clear that air traffic controller staffing levels weren’t where they should have been that night. At the time of the crash, two people in the air traffic control tower were handling the jobs of four; the controller whose job it was to keep the plane and helicopter from crashing was doing two jobs at once. These staffing levels were neither normal for the time of day nor for the amount of traffic in the skies over the nation’s capital.
In other words, the federal agency whose job it is to prevent plane crashes didn’t have adequate resources to perform its duties. And now 67 people are dead.
The federal government is currently under siege. The Trump administration is trying to winnow the ranks of the civil servants who carry its myriad functions out, forcing them back to the office, enticing them to resign, and outright firing them. He sought to freeze nearly all federal spending before backtracking in the face of a court injunction and widespread blowback, but some freezes still seem to be in place. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, serving as the president’s close adviser, has gained access to the payment systems that disperse $5.45 trillion in government money and claims to have erased at least two federal entities. His team is actively canceling grants and contracts in the Departments of Health and Education.
Against this backdrop, it’s crucial for Democrats to launch a counter-narrative by standing up for government as a force for good—a vital service to the country that keeps us healthy and safe—before the Trump administration succeeds in wiping most or all of it away.
The U.S. government is vast and hard to comprehend, making it easy to malign. Even more challenging is that a lot of its most critical functions prevent disasters from taking place, which means that, by design, the government is invisible when it’s working at its best. When the civil service is doing things right, people won’t notice it’s done anything at all.
But what it’s doing is the vast and constant work of sustaining American life. The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture inspect food and drugs to prevent them from becoming contaminated. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps chemicals and pollutants from being dumped into our air and water. Food and health programs stave off hunger and illness; other benefits ward off destitution if Americans lose a job or are lucky enough to grow old. The Consumer Product Safety Commission keeps dangerous products off the shelves. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s mission is to prevent Americans from being killed or sickened by their work. Public health programs avert disease outbreaks. Banking regulators and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are tasked with keeping financial institutions from crashing the economy and fleecing consumers. And, of course, the Department of Transportation is charged with keeping airways, roads, bridges, and waterways safe.
The Federal Aviation Administration is a perfect example of a core government function that’s been taken for granted while it’s been hollowed out. Before January, the agency had been keeping its track record clean with fewer and fewer resources, making it more and more difficult to maintain. In 2023, The New York Times warned of a growing problem of close calls at American airports; there were at least 46 such incidents in August of that year alone. The “most acute challenge,” the investigation found, “is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed.” In 2023, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general found that 77 percent of “critical facilities” were staffed below the agency’s own threshold.
Understaffing is the result of successful efforts to defund and demonize the federal workers whose job it is to keep planes from crashing into each other. Since President Ronald Reagan broke an air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 by replacing thousands of striking workers, the agency has suffered waves of staff reductions as controllers retire and it fails to recruit and train enough people to replace them. Even before the pandemic triggered more shortages, the workforce was at a 30-year low.
Safety challenges arise in the wake of “inadequate, inconsistent funding,” according to a 2023 report from the National Airspace System Safety Review Team. The agency was hit by the sequestration cuts sought by Republicans and enacted in 2013, which led to furloughs for air traffic controllers, as well as government shutdowns orchestrated by Republicans in 2013 and 2018, all of which forced the agency to halt hiring and training for over a year in total. Congress kept the FAA’s funding essentially flat between 2018 and 2023, and extra money offered during the pandemic went mostly to infrastructure, not safety roles. “At current funding levels,” the authors of the 2023 report warned, “the FAA has insufficient resources to carry out its portfolio of responsibilities.”
Insufficient funding leads to catastrophes like the American Airlines crash. It is just one of the outcomes of defunding, deleting, and destroying the government. The tragedy offers a visceral and concrete example that Democrats can and must use to demonstrate how much we all rely on a functioning federal bureaucracy. It has made visible the behind the scenes work the government does and what happens when lawmakers refuse to devote enough resources to carry it out. It offers the best chance lawmakers have to offer an affirmative vision of government to the American people, one that stands between Americans and fraud, hunger, injury, illness, and, ultimately, death.
It’s urgent that they make this argument immediately. The Republican Party has long sought to underfund and undermine the government, and Democrats have frequently struggled to respond to their depredations. Recall President Bill Clinton declaring that the era of big government was over, or President Barack Obama setting up a commission on “fiscal responsibility and reform” before the country had even recovered from the Great Recession.
But now President Donald Trump is going far beyond those traditional efforts. The administration has proven that it is interested in not just reducing government funding but getting rid of entire swaths of it completely. It’s not just the Department of Education, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, USAID, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which the administration has named as agencies it wants to erase without the permission of Congress. Trump has said he believes he has the power to refuse to spend money in violation of Congress’s legal authority to appropriate funding. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort was originally meant to cut $2 trillion from government spending: half of total government spending. If Trump’s promises to protect Social Security and Medicare are honored, there isn’t even $2 trillion to cut.
Their mission, then, is not to eliminate wasteful spending or even shave some dollars from the balance sheets of government programs; clearly these efforts will neither improve the government’s ability to function nor make it more efficient. Their mission is to destroy the federal government, full stop.
Any Democratic politician who tries to align with this mission, to find common ground and work collaboratively, is aiding that ultimate goal by giving the effort credibility and obfuscating its true intent. Staunch progressives, such as Representative Ro Khanna and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have all embarked on this fool’s errand, offering olive branches to Musk’s DOGE. Khanna and Sanders tried to find an opening to get rid of bloated defense spending. Warren handed Musk a list of 30 proposals to reduce spending, telling him, “I am happy to work with you to eliminate this government waste.”
Democrats are clearly tempted to find wins wherever they can in a second Trump administration. But DOGE offers no path to this imagined promised land. Musk’s pet project is not about government efficiency or smart spending; it’s about demonizing the government to pave the way for hollowing it out. This effort is, at best, meant to sow distrust in the government and, at worst, to slash so much of its spending that it can’t carry out the duties on which Americans rely. Democrats have to stand in lockstep against this and all of Trump’s efforts to dismantle the government.
They don’t have to pretend that the government always carries its duties out perfectly. But the root cause of government shortcomings is frequently a lack of money and resources, not squandering lavish funding or corruptly spending it, and not just at the FAA. Staffing shortages have long plagued food inspection. OSHA had just 853 federal inspectors in 2023 to cover 11.5 million workplaces. The CPSC has a budget of just $150 million to monitor 15,000 types of products. No wonder we still deal with listeria outbreaks, product recalls, and, last year, nearly 5,500 people killed on the job.
The answer to these problems is not to join the effort to root out supposed waste and fraud. That concedes the argument that the government is bad and deserving of drastic change, up to and including dismantling entire departments. That premise has to be wholeheartedly rejected. Instead, Democrats must argue that the government is good—that it is our collective effort to protect each other from the worst that can befall us. It’s not perfect, but it is worth protecting. Failing to do so will only result in more chaos, more crises, and more deaths.
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