Air Traffic Control Offices Are in Chaos in Trump’s New Administration

Almost as soon as Donald Trump was sworn in late last month, the president, Elon Musk, and their allies embarked on a smash-and-grab-style blitz of purges and hard-right ideological enforcement that brought so much of the federal government to a screeching, tumultuous halt. Trump’s rule by self-inflicted chaos trickled down to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the Department of Transportation, where even air traffic controllers and airport control towers across the country have not been able to escape the torment of a hyper-MAGA onslaught.

Over the past two long weeks, numerous different teams of already overworked, understaffed, and burnt-out air traffic controllers have watched in terror — or in some cases, glee — as their offices have grown more tense or Trumpier in the days since his January inauguration and the start of his often racist culture-war on the federal bureaucracy. The FAA has no leadership — its administrator departed on Jan. 20, the day Trump was inaugurated, after Musk demanded he resign. 

“People are scared and angry here,” one staffer working in air traffic control tells Rolling Stone, which spoke to four well-placed sources for this story. Multiple sources in different states described an intra-office culture of fear and paranoia in the second age of President Trump.

Nerves are fried, even more so than usual, and morale is low — even more so than it usually is.

One person recounted a recent incident in which they say a “fist fight” nearly broke out between two air traffic controllers around a lunch break; one was extremely supportive of Trump’s policies of eradicating diversity programs in the federal government, and the other was somebody who thinks Trump is “wrecking the country.” Multiple sources say that there is a surge of anxiety and uncertainty in their control facilities, over how secure their jobs actually are — especially if there’s evidence that they violated some kind of implicit loyalty test to the new government.

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Another one of the four sources says they recently deleted several of their own social-media posts, just in case someone at the Department of Transportation began monitoring or scouring for anti-Trump content made or written by staff. (This is not an idle concern, given that during the first Trump administration, the State Department conducted a weeks-long investigation — in which at least 10 Trump administration staffers were grilled by superiors — all because somebody at the United States’ Brussels mission had apparently “liked” a Chelsea Clinton tweet.)

That was all before the crash happened.

Federal investigators are still working to determine the cause of the deadly collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a U.S. Army helicopter Wednesday evening. The crash plunged both aircraft into the Potomac River near Washington D.C.’s Reagan Airport, killing 67 people. 

Early reporting regarding potential causes of the accident suggests nothing related to diversity is to blame for the accident. In fact, a preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration released on Thursday — details of which were obtained by the New York Times — suggests that staffing levels at the DCA control tower were “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” and that one controller was handling the jobs of two at the time of the collision.  

But first responders had not finished pulling bodies from the wreckage, or even secured the two aircrafts black boxes, before Trump and his allies injected culture-war politics into the tragedy.

On Thursday, Trump and members of his cabinet nonsensically blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives for the accident. The president told reporters that there had been “a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program.” 

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When asked directly by a reporter if he was suggesting that DEI was responsible for the collision — despite the absurdity of the claim — Trump doubled down with some racist pseudoscience. “It just could have been. We have a high standard, a much higher standard than anybody else, and there are things where you have to go by brainpower, you have to go by psychological quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it,” he said. 

Newly minted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — a former reality TV star who was met with the crisis just hours after his swearing in — told reporters at the conference that “we are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again.”

The reforms, as signed by Trump on Thursday afternoon, include an memorandum instructing the transportation secretary to “review all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols made during the prior 4 years,” and  conduct a “a systematic assessment of any deterioration in hiring standards and aviation safety standards and protocols during the Biden Administration.” 

Earlier this month, the Trump administration ordered a freeze on the hiring of new executive branch employees, which also means a freeze on the hiring of new air traffic controllers. 

Democrats on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure warned at the time, “Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry. Instead of working to improve aviation safety and lower costs for hardworking American families, the Administration is choosing to spread bogus DEI claims to justify this decision.” 

This has done nothing to address the fears and worries among the FAA’s rank-and-file air traffic controllers, who have long been overworked and frayed for reasons that have nothing to do with what Trump and conservatives lambast as “DEI.” In certain control towers, the Trump administration’s efforts at federal shock-therapy have so far only exacerbated their long-standing problems.

According to documents obtained by The New York Times, on Thursday night — as authorities continued to sift through the wreckage in the Potomac — FAA employees and air traffic controllers received an email encouraging them to start looking for other jobs. “We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” the email read. “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.”

Office cultures of underlying paranoia and unease have only gotten worse since the DCA crash, the sources tell Rolling Stone, in part because Trump is using the deadly incident to further target diversity hiring at the FAA and to stress his need for Trumpian “competence” and an overhaul at the agency.

“Am I going to get an email from President Elon tomorrow that makes my job impossible to do?” says one of the sources. “In this administration, who the hell knows? Maybe?”