President Donald Trump’s administration has laid off lots of of Federal Aviation Administration staff regardless of roughly a half dozen lethal aircraft crashes since he took workplace. However his administration continues to insist that the 2 will not be linked.
In a Tuesday interview with Newsmax, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated “it’s rich” that persons are blaming the Trump administration for the aircraft crashes. As a substitute, he appears extra eager responsible former President Joe Biden regardless of him not being in workplace when any of the six crashes passed off.
“To cast blame on this administration for the policy failures of the last four years and say it’s our fault is outrageous, but it’s rich,” Duffy stated.
He additionally confirmed earlier reporting that the Trump administration had laid off a number of hundred FAA staff, however tried to justify it by saying that “less than 400” employees had been let go lately. The MTV alum stated that was a drop within the bucket, contemplating roughly 45,000 folks are employed by the FAA.
The current statements from Duffy echo previous ones he’s made on social media. On Monday, he made an identical argument that the probationary employees who have been let go made up solely a small fraction of the workforce.
“[T]hey were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago,” Duffy stated of the affected employees in a Monday publish to X. “Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.”
Nonetheless, on Saturday, the union representing FAA staff slammed the federal authorities’s resolution to out of the blue terminate the airline employees. The union stated the selections have been performed with out trigger “nor based on performance or conduct.”
“Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety,” David Spero, nationwide president of the Skilled Aviation Security Specialists, stated in a assertion. “And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”
Notably, since Duffy’s ill-timed statements, there was one other airplane-related casualty. In response to preliminary reporting, at the least two folks have been killed in a crash at an airport within the Tuscon, Arizona, space on Wednesday morning.
However earlier than Trump and his wildly unqualified Cupboard picks took management of Washington, D.C., the final main deadly passenger-jet crash occurred in 2009. Nonetheless, Trump and his administration have continued to defer blame and demand that they don’t have anything to do with the incidents—pointing the finger at all the pieces to former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to office variety insurance policies.
What the Trump administration fails to account for is that it’s shedding employees from an already understaffed business. In January, a passenger jet and a navy helicopter collided close to Ronald Reagan Nationwide Airport, in Washington, D.C., killing all 67 folks aboard each aircrafts. Staffing on the air visitors management tower that day was “not normal,” in accordance with an FAA report.
Because the president and his cronies proceed to try to shift blame to Democrats for the lethal crashes, Duffy introduced that officers from Trump donor Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX deliberate to go to the FAA Air Site visitors Management System Command Heart, in Virginia.
As a result of letting Musk’s cronies stomp via authorities companies has labored out nicely thus far.
