Trump and Elon’s ‘Pointless Bloodbath’ at the FAA Is Even Worse Than You Think
Late last week, just as Presidents’ Day weekend was starting, Donald Trump and Elon Musk purged hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees — including multiple lawyers whose job was to help prevent pilots with drug and alcohol problems from getting in the cockpit, knowledgeable sources tell Rolling Stone.
According to a person familiar with the matter and another source briefed on it, the mass job cuts at the FAA hit multiple legal offices at the agency, which is part of the Department of Transportation. Different kinds of lawyers were abruptly let go, blindsiding numerous staffers and officials who could not see much rhyme or reason to these dismissals.
“It’s such a pointless bloodbath,” says the second source, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Every time we try to figure out why this or that was done, the answers you get from the Trump and Musk guys usually amount to: Because we can. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Musk and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have axed probationary employees across the federal workforce, as part of Trump’s lawless clampdown. Such employees are typically new hires, though they can also be longtime workers who received promotions; either way, these workers have lower workplace protections for a year, making them attractive targets for Trump’s brute-force strategy to shrink the government.
The Musk firing offensive has already created significant problems. Those axed included federal employees responsible for nuclear weapons safety and workers leading the Agriculture Department’s response to the bird flu. (Those agencies have reportedly attempted to rehire the critical employees.)
Regarding their FAA cuts, Musk and the Trump White House have tried to argue they skipped over anyone whose role might be considered safety-critical. “It’s a bunch of bullshit,” one current FAA worker tells Rolling Stone. “The definition of ‘critical’ can be fucked around with as much as they’d like. We were already an underfunded and understaffed agency.”
While air traffic controllers were supposedly immune from the purge, some air traffic control support workers were terminated, the FAA worker says. Rolling Stone separately spoke with a fired FAA employee whose job involved ensuring flight paths account for hazards like cranes and new buildings, as well as another terminated FAA staffer who ensured that pilots are medically able and cleared to fly. No one wants their plane to cross paths with a crane, of course, but the latter role is important, too, given the nation’s ongoing pilot shortage.
One particularly confounding round of firings last week — one that confused even agency personnel who were anticipating a Trumpian bloodletting — included several attorneys who work to ensure that licensed pilots in the United States aren’t putting the broader public in danger or hiding criminal records, health concerns, or serious addictions, according to the sources.
This work in the Aviation Litigation Division involves investigating flight schools that improperly or negligently train pilots; potentially suspending the licenses of private or commercial-airline pilots who get DUIs and other relevant criminal charges that would suggest it is unwise to allow them to fly planes full of passengers; dealing with commercial pilots if they’re caught engaging in reckless or unsafe behavior, or lying about a drinking problem or an illicit drug dependency; and addressing reports that drone operators are breaking FAA rules and regulations.
Across the country, the FAA employs just dozens of these types of lawyers who handle this kind of enforcement. Last week, Trump and Musk abruptly got rid of several of them, which some estimated to be upwards of 10 percent of an already overworked legal team. This was handled so chaotically by the Trump administration and Musk’s DOGE that some of these fired lawyers’ bosses were caught off guard entirely by the news.
The terminated FAA staffer, who worked to medically certify pilots, similarly says their own firing came as a surprise given “all the aviation crashes and things going on” — though they note that since Trump took office, “it’s just been one shitstorm after the other.”
A Transportation Department spokesperson tells Rolling Stone, “The FAA continues to hire and onboard air traffic controllers and safety professionals, including mechanics and others who support them. The agency has retained employees who perform safety-critical functions.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Real World cast member, was booed at an event in Los Angeles on Thursday as he attempted to defend the mass firings. Duffy said the fired employees were probationary and thus “not the highest-skilled of the FAA,” and that the department “exempted people who work in critical safety positions.” He added that if anyone argues the job cuts will “have an impact on air travel, that’s a political game that is being played.”
The White House and DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.
In the first month of Trump’s second term, there has been a series of terrifying plane accidents, starting with a deadly mid-air collision outside Washington, D.C., between a U.S. army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet. There was also a fatal plane crash in Pennsylvania, a fatal plane crash off the coast of Alaska, a plane accident in Toronto involving a plane traveling from Minneapolis, and a mid-air collision between two small planes in Arizona.
While the current and former FAA staffers do not blame Trump and Musk’s purge or their crackdown on diversity programs for any of these accidents, they all say that the administration’s mass firings and needlessly shambolic management could make it more difficult for an already stretched-thin workforce to do its job and keep Americans safe.
Not to worry: Musk offered up the services of his aerospace company, SpaceX, to the FAA to “help make air travel safer” — and some of Musk’s SpaceX engineers have already been brought on board as senior advisors to the FAA’s acting administrator. (The agency’s previous administrator departed when Trump became president; Musk had demanded his resignation after the FAA fined SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations.)
Following the mass firings last week, Musk’s DOGE army has only stepped up its rampage within the FAA. There’s now an ominous atmosphere within the agency, along with heightened security and a beefed-up DOGE presence, according to two government sources.
The atmosphere resembles accounts of when Musk first took over Twitter, now known as X, starting with a raft of firings and demands that remaining staffers justify their continued employment with the company.
“There’s a lot of worry people are going to get fired, because the DOGE people don’t know what we do before they fire people,” the current FAA worker says. “How are you going to make efficiency changes when you don’t even know the basics?”
“Who knows who they’ll be willing to get rid of next,” they add.
Have a tip for our reporters? Contact Asawin Suebsaeng at swin24.68, Tim Dickinson at Tim.415, and Andrew Perez on Signal at aperezrs.15.