Trump’s Lieutenants Say Fired Workers Didn’t Focus On Safety. These Dot Employees Say Otherwise.

A Transportation Department employee who studied how to prevent highway deaths lost their job. So did one who focused on preventing pipelines from leaking and exploding. And so did people at an agency that dives into how to keep impaired drivers off the roads.

The Trump administration’s initial wave of mass firings at DOT has touched a wide swath of employees whose work helps keep Americans safe, more than a dozen current and former department staff members told POLITICO — as agencies across the government brace for even steeper cuts.

The employees’ warnings contrast with public assurances from President Donald Trump’s appointees that the sprawling cost-cutting crusade, spearheaded by multibillionaire Elon Musk, is aimed at targeting bloat and waste while leaving public safety and other essential services intact. They also shed new light on the scope and impact of the administration’s agency-by-agency purge of thousands of probationary employees in mid-February, which occurred with little transparency about which specific offices and bureaus were feeling the ax.

Many of those firings in other parts of the federal government are in doubt after a judge on Thursday ordered the rehiring of tens of thousands of probationary workers at six departments, but that ruling did not include DOT.

On Wednesday, a DOT spokesperson revealed that 788 probationary employees across the agency had been let go since the beginning of the Trump administration — a figure that the agency stressed is just 1.4 percent of the department’s workforce.

Those who lost their jobs included a researcher studying how to reduce highway deaths, said the current and former employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the terminations. Others worked for the DOT arm that investigates and can order recalls of defective cars, such as those made by Musk’s Tesla.

The purge also extended to someone whose job was to guard against leaks and other hazards along 2.6 million miles of gas and other pipelines, according to one of the fired workers.

“The people saying losing these jobs are not going to affect safety are just idiots,” the former employee said.

A total of 13 current and former DOT employees spoke to POLITICO, including six who were fired in a purge of probationary workers Feb. 14. Those firings were a prelude to additional terminations expected at the more than 55,000-employee department as Trump pursues the next stage of downsizing the federal bureaucracy.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has insisted that none of the ousted workers were critical to safety. He has specifically highlighted the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers as a workforce that has remained intact, although one FAA employees’ union has countered that more than 130 employees whose work supports the controllers did lose their jobs.

The DOT spokesperson reiterated in a statement Wednesday that cuts to less than 2 percent of DOT’s workforce “do not run counter to the mission of safety” and that its “teams are layered with redundancies that ensure restructuring does not compromise safety operations.”

The spokesperson said that safety is Duffy’s first priority and added that if DOT’s employees “feel this new, fast-paced, solutions-orientated environment is too challenging, it may be time to consider a job outside of the department.”

But safety advocates outside the government shared the employees’ alarm at the firings’ impact, including those at less well-known branches of DOT such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has around 800 employees.

Roughly 4 percent of NHTSA’s workforce was fired in the Feb. 14 purge of probationary employees, according to a DOT spokesperson. Among them were several people in the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation, which regularly probes automakers and can initiate recalls for defective vehicle designs and parts, according to a current NHTSA employee granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The defects office is “critical to public safety because these are the people who actually understand the systems that make your brakes work and whether there might be a defect that makes them fail,” a former NHTSA official told POLITICO.

Roadway deaths since 2013 have spiked in recent years, with the number of motor vehicle fatalities peaking at 43,230 in 2021, according to data from NHTSA. The total number of deaths for 2023 was 40,990, up 25 percent from a decade earlier. They have been trending downward since 2021.

“We’re already in a really poor place when it comes to road safety,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the Vision Zero Network, which advocates for safer roads. She called the cuts worrisome, adding that the agency’s employees “focus on keeping everyday Americans safe as they go to school and go to work.”

“Going out on the roads is one of the more dangerous things Americans do in their lives, and it doesn’t have to be,” Shahum said.

One of the fired DOT employees had been evaluating what traffic safety measures work and which don’t. Like many of the fired probationary workers, this person received a notice saying the termination was due to poor performance, as opposed to Trump's and Musk’s directives to fillet the federal workforce.

“It felt insulting to see it framed as having to do with performance. It was kind of a gut punch to see it framed that way,” the employee said, adding, “I started worrying about my projects.”

Under the Biden administration, NHTSA took an aggressive stance in probing Tesla, including an investigation into whether Tesla’s erroneously named “Autopilot” and “full self driving” system misleads drivers into thinking they can safely pay less attention to driving than they should.

The regulator also launched an inquiry into Musk’s company after several crashes involving a phone app remote control technology that people use to get their cars out of tough parking spots and other situations.

Duffy has said he also views lessening highway dangers as a prime concern, noting in written testimony prepared for his Senate nomination hearing that his wife had survived a head-on car crash. He vowed to “prioritize road safety, ensuring lives and families aren’t forever changed by preventable accidents.”

Researchers hit hard

But part of ensuring safety involves research that underpins the way rules and regulations are crafted. And one of the areas hit hardest by those terminations was DOT’s research arm — the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where 11 percent of its employees hold doctorates.

According to several people with knowledge of the terminations, more than 60 people at Volpe were fired. Its campus in Massachusetts also appeared on an administration list of more than 400 federal buildings that the government could sell as part of its cost-cutting, though Volpe’s headquarters was later removed when the administration deleted the list from a federal website.

Volpe’s research stretches across all modes of transportation. Active projects include studying how pilots interact with airplane technologies, systems that can help reduce driving under the influence of various substances and efforts to push forward the transition to a new satellite-based form of air traffic control.

Volpe receives no congressional appropriations. Its funds come from sponsor projects.

One of the employees fired the evening of Valentine’s Day examined pipeline leaks and explosions with the goal of reducing their frequency and harm.

“My research helps to develop a clear understanding of when and where pipeline accidents and incidents happen — what are the most likely contributors to these things, who is most likely to be affected,” the former employee said. “Understanding those things is really essential to creating regulations and rules to make sure future incidents do not occur or at least are not as dangerous.”

Another fired employee’s work involved studying how to improve the safety of electric vehicle batteries and how to ensure that people with physical and cognitive disabilities can use automated public transportation, such as autonomous buses.

“I’m really worried about who is going to take on the work we’ve left behind,” the fired employee said.

Another agency that took a big cut was the Federal Transit Administration, which administers transit grant programs and oversees the safety of transit systems that accept federal dollars. Around 80 of the agency’s probationary workers were fired, a person familiar with the dismissals said. Around 700 people work for FTA’s headquarters in Washington, but an additional number work in field offices.

At the Federal Highway Administration, which administers funding for highway, bridge and other roadway projects as well as programs to reduce roadway deaths nationwide, more than 130 probationary employees from across the country were fired, including two from the Office of Safety, according to a person familiar with the list.

The most concentrated spate of firings was the 25 employees who were terminated from FHWA’s Office of Federal Lands Highway, which provides money and engineering help for public roads that service federal and Native American lands.

Three workers from FHWA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer and two from its Office of Policy and Governmental Affairs also lost their jobs. The division offices, which are FHWA regional offices spread across the nation, were also hit, including four employees from Alaska, three from Texas and two from Washington.

Terminations and threat of more are slowing DOT down

The employees left behind say they are struggling to pick up the slack. Some said they are locked out of their former colleagues’ data files, making it impossible to continue their work.

“It’s been a struggle to continue our work without them,” a current DOT worker said, giving as an example work that can’t be accessed because it was on a fired worker’s laptop.

Morale among those who remain is also low, which has its own impact on work.

“It’s batshit crazy. We came in to work and 10 percent of our staff was cut,” a DOT employee said. The federal worker also sharply criticized emails that require employees to justify the work they’ve done over a given week. “I feel like these projects are going to take significantly longer because of the people he laid off,” another former DOT employee said.

And those who remain say the stress and turmoil are taking a toll on their mental and physical health. At least two people who are still at DOT said either they or their colleagues had sought medical attention amid the chaos — one for heart palpitations and another for chest pain.

In addition, some interviewed said the uncertainty of more terminations makes it hard to plan delivery dates and schedule meetings when you don’t know who will be there in a month or two.

“There’s already limited staffing, and we’re figuring out how the projects are going to make it with limited staffing,” a DOT employee said. “Sort of a bleak outlook.”

This, in turn, has tarnished many employees’ attitudes toward Duffy, the current and former workers say. Those who were fired say Duffy isn’t calling the shots and isn’t standing up for safety. Others said he doesn’t fundamentally understand how projects are undertaken from start to finish, or feel that he betrayed them by reneging on his stated commitment to safety.

“I think Duffy is a right-wing-coded pretty face that they put in charge,” a former FHWA employee said. “I think he will take his marching orders and do them. I just don’t think the marching orders are worth much.”

When asked to respond to the criticisms by his current and former employees, a DOT spokesperson pointed back to a prepared statement saying, in part, that “Secretary Duffy will continue to make safety his number one priority, and any suggestion to the contrary is a lie.”