President Donald Trump's administration began mass firings of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees on Friday, a move that comes just weeks after a fatal midair collision in Washington, D.C., and as concerns mount over air traffic control staffing shortages.
Newsweek reached out to the FAA and the White House via email for comment on Monday.
Why It Matters
The mass dismissals follow a deadly January 29 collision involving a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The crash, which remains under investigation, has raised new scrutiny over the FAA's ability to manage high-traffic airspace safely.
The firings also come after Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a task force led by billionaire Elon Musk, to reduce federal costs and workforce. In its first month of operation, it has restructured multiple federal agencies and recommended mass layoffs.
What To Know
The dismissals, first reported by CNN, which targeted probationary employees, were communicated via late-night emails on Friday, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement to the Associated Press.
According to one air traffic controller who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity, the firings affected several hundred workers responsible for maintaining FAA radar, landing systems, and navigational aids, which are critical infrastructure for aviation safety.
The employees were fired "without cause nor based on performance or conduct," Spero said, adding that the emails were "from an 'exec order' Microsoft email address," not a government email address.
According to the AP, a fired FAA employee, Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, alleged that his dismissal may have been politically motivated. In a LinkedIn post, Spitzer-Stadtlander said he was terminated shortly after criticizing Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), both owned by Musk.
Spitzer-Stadtlander suggested that he was supposed to be exempt from the firings due to his role in national security efforts related to drone threats. He claimed his computer was remotely disabled, and all his files were wiped without warning.
"The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter," Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote. "Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security."
The firings come on the heels of the deadly aviation crash in late January. The collision, which killed 67, occurred just days after Trump decided to dissolve the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a congressional-mandated panel established after the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. The committee played a key role in examining safety issues at airlines and airports.
Staffing Concerns
The firings come amid fresh concerns over staffing shortages at air traffic control facilities in the aftermath of the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in decades.
FAA employees, who requested anonymity because they are forbidden to speak to reporters, previously told Newsweek that low staffing levels in the high-pressure job equate to long hours, widespread mandatory overtime and high turnover rates within the federal agency responsible for protecting the nation's busy skies.
"The air traffic system, especially in reference to staffing, is absolutely critical," one veteran controller told Newsweek. "It's been dangerous for years."
FAA officials at the time did not respond to a question on the controllers' allegations that staffing shortages have a detrimental impact on safety and operations.
One controller, with nearly 10 years of FAA experience, said it's unclear if insufficient staffing factored into the January 29 collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and the Army helicopter. However, it wasn't wholly surprising to many aviation experts, they said.
"We've all seen s*** that's f****** crazy that nobody hears about, right? The unfortunate reality is that we have been saying for years [that] it's going to take a fatality with an air carrier to get people's attention," they said.
This comes as the FAA announced in September that it had hired more than 1,800 air traffic controllers in 2024, bringing the nationwide tally to more than 14,000, including roughly 3,400 in various training stages.
The number of certified professional controllers stands at 10,800, several thousand short of the current target of 14,600 as set by the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a union representing federal employees.
FAA officials said reversing the decades-long decline of air traffic controllers is a top priority.
"We continue to hire and onboard new controllers. Their work is critical to meeting our safety mission," the agency told Newsweek in a statement last week.
What People Are Saying
President Donald Trump during a press conference in late January: "We have to have our smartest people. It doesn't matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are. What matters is intellect, talent. The word talent—they have to be talented, naturally talented, geniuses.
"Brilliant people have to be in those positions [air traffic controllers], and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress, where you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it."
FAA statement to Fox News in April 2024: "Every FAA-certified air traffic controller has gone through months of screening and training at the FAA Academy, and that is before another 18-24 months of training to learn specific regions and airspaces. There is a well-known national shortage of air traffic controllers, and the FAA has ramped up outreach to ensure no talent is left on the table. We are accelerating the pace of recruiting, training, and hiring to meet demand while maintaining the highest qualification standards."
What Happens Next
While the exact number of employees impacted by the firings at the FAA is unclear, cuts to federal government spending, including more layoffs, are expected to continue across other agencies.
Meanwhile, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Monday that officials from Musk's space technology company, SpaceX, will be visiting the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia on Tuesday to "get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current roles, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system."
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About the writer
Natalie Venegas is a Weekend Reporter at Newsweek based in New York. Her focus is reporting on education, social justice ... Read more