The administration of United States President Donald Trump has begun a mass firing campaign targeting the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), including workers focused on radar, landing and navigational maintenance.
Personnel from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory panel led by billionaire Elon Musk, is visiting FAA headquarters on Monday, as the group continues a controversial effort to access government data and slash the federal workforce.
Hundreds of probationary employees were among those fired at the FAA, despite efforts to boost hiring in recent years. Insiders have long warned that the FAA’s current workforce is stretched thin and the air traffic control system is chronically under-resourced.
“We are troubled and disappointed by the administration’s decision to fire FAA probationary employees PASS represents without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) union said in a statement on Saturday.
The union noted that the termination notices appeared to have come from outside the government’s official communications systems, used to ensure the security of email messages, as well as transparency in the case of records requests.
“Several hundred employees have been impacted with messages being sent from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address, not an official .gov email address,” the union explained.
“Messages began arriving after 7pm ET on February 14 and continued late into the night.”
The firings come several weeks after a fatal midair collision over the Potomac River near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC.
That crash, which took place between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk military helicopter on January 29, sparked debate over the safety of US air travel and conditions for the air traffic control workers.
All passengers on both aircraft were killed: 64 civilians and three soldiers.
One controller was responsible for overseeing both commercial and helicopter flights around the bustling airport on the day of the crash. Trump and his allies blamed the incident on diversity initiatives without evidence. The collision remains under investigation.
In a social media post on Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that DOGE staff will go to FAA headquarters in order to “get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system”.
The FAA oversees an average of about 45,000 flights per day, with a quarter of all flights in the world arriving or departing from US airports.
The PASS union condemned the firings and said the “draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin”.
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