Trump’s Air-Crash Disaster

Four Day Two Things Trump Did Made The Air Crash More Likely. And That Was Just The Beginning.

By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

A mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet killed 67 people Wednesday night, and while convicted felon Donald Trump was typically quick to cast blame on others his own responsibility was impossible to ignore, even before any detailed investigation.

On Trump’s second day in office, he fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, along with the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and 100 Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] security officers. He also froze the hiring of all air traffic controllers, even though there’s an extreme shortage of them—about 3,000 according to the FAA, resulting in 77% of facilities being understaffed, according to a 2023 report. Making things worse, a week later, all air traffic controllers were offered a buyout to resign in eight months, as part of an offer made to all federal employees.

If you get the feeling Trump was indifferent to air travel safety, you’d certainly be justified. But there’s more: His first day in office the head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker — who’d been confirmed by the Senate 98-0 — resigned under attack from Trump’s un-elected co-president Elon Musk, and Trump didn’t even bother to appoint an acting head to take his place, despite having more than a month’s notice in advance.

Not only had the FAA fined Musk’s company SpaceX $630,000 for noncompliance with launch requirements on two missions. Whitaker had the nerve to testify before Congress, thus drawing attention to Musk’s reckless disregard for safety. That’s when Musk started calling for him to resign, even though he was appointed to a five-year term and had served only one. After Trump won the election, Whitaker announced he’d resign the day Trump took office — but with more than a month’s notice, Trump simply couldn’t be bothered to find someone to take his place, even temporarily.

None of this is directly responsible for the tragedy. But there was only one air traffic controller on duty, doing a two-person job. And Trump’s actions only made that problem worse, weakening air travel safety nationwide, making such a tragedy more likely. All of it showed a disregard for public safety that’s arguably the defining characteristic of Trump’s not-yet-two-week-old administration, seen most visibly in his irresponsible nomination of anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, along with his illegal order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization.

Trump characteristically, tried to blame-shift, pointing his finger at his predecessors and suggesting that diversity efforts might be to blame. Indeed, one of his first actions was to issue a memorandum “terminating a Biden Administration Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hiring policy that prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over safety and efficiency,” an administration “fact sheet” explained. Not only is there no evidence that the goals were in conflict, but the extreme ATC shortage underscored the need to cast as wide a net as possible. In particular, the “fact sheet” stated:

• • • Almost unbelievably, as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, the Biden FAA specifically recruited and hired individuals with “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis over other individuals who sought to work for the FAA.

Not only was this characterization utterly false, the disability hiring initiative actually dated back to 2013, and had continued as policy throughout Trump’s first term in office.

While there’s a long investigation ahead into this particular tragedy, we already know more than enough about the broader systemic problems that make air travel less safe than it ought to be—and we know that Trump is doing less than nothing to correct that threat to public safety.