The Faa’s Troubles Are More Serious Than You Know

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.

But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.

Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.

That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.

Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government jobs and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”

Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already-understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”

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But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.

The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.

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When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.

At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.

“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”

The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement.  The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.

“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”

The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”

The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.

In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.

So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.

Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.

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The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys having signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.

Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”

SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”

In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”

When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.

“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.

Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

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The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.

“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”

Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”