She’s the Face of Trump’s Aviation Safety Board, and She’s a Democrat

As the National Transportation Safety Board meets on Tuesday to make an official determination about what caused a midair collision last year near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, its outspoken chairwoman is stepping back into a spotlight that she never fully left.

Jennifer Homendy, the chair, has been an unusually public crusader for changes to the aviation system in the year since her agency began probing why a military helicopter and a commercial jet collided near Ronald Reagan National Airport. A rare Democrat running a federal agency under President Trump, she has used her bully pulpit to lend support to — or dish out scathing criticism of — government initiatives and legislation concerning aviation safety. And she has offered effusive praise for the Trump administration’s efforts to make improvements — even when doing so has rankled peers and members of her own party.

Ms. Homendy has retained her post atop a federal oversight agency at a time when many investigators and inspectors general, including a member of the N.T.S.B., were fired by the Trump administration. She has the rare distinction of having earned the trust not just of Republicans, but of President Trump himself.

“The White House maintains the utmost confidence in Jennifer Homendy, who is playing a key role in ensuring that Americans can have peace of mind each time they board a flight or train,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement this week.

The meeting on Tuesday is the culmination of an investigation that could be legacy-defining for Ms. Homendy, 54, who was a lobbyist and longtime congressional staff member before she joined the investigative agency in 2018.

The deadliest U.S. aviation accident in a generation created a rare appetite for action, as lawmakers and administration officials proposed changes, including to flight routes and rules governing the use of advanced aircraft tracking technology. That the board was able to wrap up the probe in about a year is a testament to how much urgency surrounded it.

On Tuesday, when investigators settle on a probable cause of the accident and issue recommendations, Ms. Homendy’s penchant for aggressive advocacy will once again be on display. But her style is not just for the dais: It’s a reflection of her contention that the N.T.S.B. has to be more visible around Washington if members want decision makers to heed their advice.

“You need to be proactive — and I felt that we were reactive for so many years,” she said during an interview in her Washington office last week. “We have such an important role in safety that it needed to be elevated.”

Between her duties overseeing a large investigative docket and the agency’s administrative operations, Ms. Homendy spends a sizable chunk of every day on the phone. She reaches out to heads of the Department of Transportation and its subagencies, White House officials and lawmakers, frequently offering briefings to get people up to speed on the N.T.S.B.’s dealings.

“I’m not waiting for them to call me,” she said. “They need information to do their job, and what I don’t want them to have is the wrong information, what they might be reading in something or on social media.”

The agency has a mandate to investigate transportation incidents, including all civil aviation accidents in the United States, but no regulatory authority. It can only make recommendations to Congress and the president. The board is designed to be nonpartisan, with no more than three of its five members belonging to the same political party.

Ms. Homendy’s focus on outreach is informed by an early career in lobbying, followed by nearly 15 years working for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s subpanel on railroads. During that time, she would often wonder why N.T.S.B. officials were such a rare presence around Congress. When the Trump administration selected her for the board, she vowed to do things differently.

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Within months of joining, Ms. Homendy began campaigning for full implementation of positive train control, an automated system to prevent rail accidents. When she became chair in 2021, she sought to imbue the entire agency with a sense of responsibility to educate outsiders.

It wasn’t the smoothest transition. Some N.T.S.B. employees bristled at the added demands and worried that they were distracting from investigative work, according to current and former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of exposing individuals to retaliation. They pointed to significant attrition among retirement-eligible staff since Ms. Homendy became chair, a period that overlapped with the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.

But under Ms. Homendy’s leadership, the agency also expanded its budget by nearly a quarter and reduced a punishing backlog of cases. The board also managed to avoid crippling austerity measures imposed on other parts of the government — things Ms. Homendy attributes to having cultivated advocates throughout Washington.

“That development of those relationships over time, I believe, has created a lot of trust back and forth,” she said.

In 2023, Ms. Homendy’s habit of responding positively to any lawmaker’s request for a briefing yielded a particularly valuable connection.

After a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing toxic gases and forcing an evacuation of the area, she and a staff member pulled a wagon full of materials from the N.T.S.B.’s public docket through the halls of the Capitol to brief the staff of the state’s junior senator. When that senator, JD Vance, was later selected to be Mr. Trump’s vice president, she suddenly had advocates in the president’s immediate orbit.

Representatives for Mr. Vance did not respond to a request for comment.

A similar overture kicked off her partnership with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The night of the Washington collision was the second time Ms. Homendy recalls offering to help Mr. Duffy, who had been confirmed as secretary only the afternoon before. Within days, she was shepherding him around wreckage and rescue operations at the crash site. A few months later, she appeared alongside him as he unveiled plans to upgrade the nation’s air traffic control system.

In a statement, Mr. Duffy described Ms. Homendy’s leadership as “remarkable.” Last week, Ms. Homendy described Mr. Duffy as “the most engaged secretary on safety and with this agency in the entire time I have served as chair of the N.T.S.B.”

But her apparent closeness with administration officials and other Republicans has also prompted concerns among some N.T.S.B. employees and Democratic staffers that she could risk politicizing the traditionally nonpartisan agency, even as some of the same people applaud her commitment to advancing safety.

Last month, without directly warning the rest of the board, she took the rare step of calling an emergency news conference to demand changes to an annual defense bill that was pending before Congress, warning that it would make the skies over Reagan National Airport less safe.

In July, Ms. Homendy appeared alongside Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas and the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing transportation, at a news conference to tout aviation safety legislation that no Democrats had endorsed yet. And last fall, she promoted John DeLeeuw, Mr. Trump’s pick to replace the N.T.S.B. member whom he fired last year and who is suing to get his job back.

Analysts say such moves are expedient and reveal her political savvy.

“She’s done a masterful job of dealing with multiple political pressures,” Alan Diehl, an aviation safety consultant said in an interview, adding that “if she were not to do that, she would probably be replaced, almost certainly — and that would be a very bad thing for aviation safety.”

But Ms. Homendy disputes the suggestion that politics are on her mind.

“I don’t care if you’re the president, United States vice president, a secretary, you know, an intern,” she added. “If you’re for safety, I don’t care who you are. I will meet with you. I will work with you.”

Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.

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