WASHINGTON – After recent layoffs of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration and a string of aviation incidents, passengers and experts expressed concerns that U.S. airlines’ excellent safety record could be at risk.
About 400 probationary workers were removed from the FAA beginning on February 14, just weeks after the DCA midair collision on January 29 that left 67 dead. On February 17, at least 18 people were injured when a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis crash-landed upside down on a runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
The layoffs are part of an extensive effort spearheaded by the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk, to consolidate the federal government. Some experts cautioned that given the high profile of aviation safety, cuts at the FAA could demonstrate the perils of shrinking government.
While no air traffic controllers were laid off, aviation safety experts warned that cuts could further strain the agency, which has long suffered from staffing shortages.
So far, some 400 of about 45,000 FAA employees have been laid off, according to a post on X by Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. Of them, 132 belong to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), a union representing about 11,000 FAA employees, according to Dave Spero, the organization’s president.
Aeronautical safety specialists, maintenance mechanics, and employees in aviation safety assistance roles were among those who were terminated, according to Spero. Although no air traffic controllers were laid off, Spero emphasized that these roles are critical positions within the FAA.
The impact of recent layoffs
Experts said these layoffs will only worsen pre-existing staffing problems.
“I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but the system is operating under a lot of dynamic stresses. As it is, with the normal staffing problems, with the normal retirement challenges and things like that that are going on, this is going to make it so much worse,” said Philip Mann, a former FAA certified technician and aviation safety expert.
Following the DCA midair collision, Americans’ confidence in air travel dipped slightly, with 64% of U.S. adults saying plane travel is very or somewhat safe, down from 71% last year, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll. Public faith in the federal government’s ability to maintain air safety also dropped slightly.
Still, experts stressed that the National Airspace System and commercial flight in the U.S. is still the safest way to travel.
However, Mann commented that many of those laid off worked to maintain air traffic controllers' systems, which could cause system outages similar to weather delays that travelers are used to. Since air traffic will only be able to manage a lighter load of aircrafts, an increase in flight delays is a very possible consequence of the layoffs.
“There won't be more crashes,” he said. “There will be fewer airplanes flying.”
A former air traffic controller echoed Mann’s outlook on the layoffs.
“To an extent, it could slow things down, but at the same time, it's not an immediate safety risk,” said the former air traffic controller, who recently resigned and asked to remain anonymous while searching for other work.
The former air traffic controller said they see a benefit in smaller government.
“I'm a fan of downsizing government,” they said. “I do think that there's a lot of bloat in certain areas, but I guess my balanced opinion is that it stinks that the people that are getting harmed by it are people that just show up to their job every day.”
Congress examines the future of FAA infrastructure
Spero appeared as a witness at a House Subcommittee on Aviation hearing aimed at addressing a need for the modernization of the U.S. air traffic control system.
Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Troy E. Nehls (R-Texas-22) opened the hearing by emphasizing the importance of upgrading technology and improving hiring at the FAA.
“This moment in time represents a unique opportunity for the members of this subcommittee and all aviation stakeholders to coalesce around a common goal: meaningful air traffic control modernization that will benefit the flying public and all users of the National Airspace System,” Nehls said.
Spero emphasized a need for adequate staffing and better management of aging equipment systems within the agency. In an interview following the congressional hearing, Spero reiterated his union members' critical role in the agency and the dangers of gambling with future safety by terminating employees.
“Without us, you can't even go into a terminal radar approach control and turn on the light. We provide all of the power and electronics to make that stuff happen,” he said.
What Americans need to know
Despite recent air accidents, experts emphasized that air travel still remained safe.
“I think everyone has heightened awareness because of the Washington, D.C., midair collision accident, but I do not see some nefarious trend or anything,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant and former Chief Accident Investigator at the FAA.
However, other experts are concerned about the recent accidents.
“I think the media tends to try to sensationalize things and make a problem, but a problem doesn't exist without foundation,” said Rich Martindell, an aviation safety consultant and a retired Air Force aircraft accident investigator.
With safety and operations under scrutiny, many aviation experts cautioned against more layoffs.
“It's too early to tell what these FAA layoffs will do to safety, but I do hope that they stop. The FAA has perennially been understaffed and at this point in time. With the public having such attention on aviation safety, it's not a good look for the administration to target the FAA for any of these workforce reductions,” Guzzetti said.
Mann underscored that people’s lives are at risk.
“I will argue that there is no such thing as a job in the Department of Transportation, which includes the FAA, that does not somehow impact either safety directly, or it impacts the people who do impact safety directly.”
Lenna Peterson covers politics for Medill on the Hill. She is a junior at Northwestern University pursuing a double major in journalism and history and a certificate in Holocaust studies. While in Evanston, she serves as an executive producer, reporter and anchor for Northwestern News Network. From Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Peterson interned on the Copywriting Team at Rocket Mortgage this past summer.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.