Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
Search and rescue efforts are seen around a wreckage site in the Potomac River from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, early Thursday morning, in Arlington, Virginia.
Wednesday night saw the first commercial airline crash in the United States in 16 years. American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter while on landing approach to Reagan National Airport south of Washington, D.C. There are reportedly no survivors.
It is of course not clear yet exactly what happened. Full details will have to wait for an investigation, if the Trump administration is capable of conducting one. But given the damage Donald Trump and shadow president Elon Musk have already inflicted on the federal government in general and airline safety system in particular, it would be quite the coincidence if their actions had nothing to do with it.
Let’s review a few events from Trump’s first days in office. On January 20, the day Trump was inaugurated, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Michael Whitaker, resigned. Since then, the agency has been run by acting administrator Chris Rocheleau.
This was unusual. With a few exceptions, like during President Reagan’s vindictive mass firing of unionized air traffic controllers, the FAA has been a relatively uncontroversial agency. Administrators commonly serve out their five-year terms even if the presidency changes hands—President Obama’s FAA chief served into 2018 under Trump. Indeed, ensuring agency stability was one reason Congress made the position longer than a presidential term.
But shadow president Elon Musk—who, let me emphasize, is a foreign-born billionaire who has not been elected or appointed to any post—had been demanding Whitaker be sacked for months, because the FAA had been attempting to regulate his company SpaceX. The agency had conducted investigations (when, for instance, a SpaceX rocket blew up near the ground), delayed launches, and imposed some fines—though the amounts were pitiful, just $633,009 when the company allegedly broke two promises about safety protocols and fuel use.
“I think safety is in the public interest and that’s our primary focus,” Whitaker told members of Congress in a hearing about SpaceX last September. Fines are “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.” Musk responded with sneering contempt on Twitter/X: “America is being smothered by legions of regulators, often inept & politically-driven.” Wouldn’t you know it, a few months later a SpaceX Starship module exploded and broke up in the atmosphere, spreading 100 metric tons of debris across the Caribbean, forcing the diversion of numerous flights, and reportedly causing some property damage in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
On January 22, Trump fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, as well as every member of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.
Also on January 20, Trump imposed a hiring freeze across the entire federal government, and air traffic controllers (ATCs) are federal employees. The FAA has been struggling for years to make up for an ATC shortage caused by the pandemic; though it finally met its hiring goal in 2024, controllers are still reportedly stretched thin. As Reps. Rick Larsen (D-WA) and Steve Cohen (D-TN) pointed out in a joint press release, Trump’s move was both illegal, as the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 requires maximum staffing of ATCs, and dangerous. “Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry,” they wrote.
Some important context here is that the airspace over Reagan National Airport is some of the most congested in the world, in part because members of Congress, who are flying constantly, don’t like to use the much less convenient Dulles Airport. Allowing planes at DCA to land and take off safely every couple of minutes, all day, every day, requires a highly elaborate set of controls and procedures to prevent collisions.
Then on January 22, Trump fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration (who was first appointed by Trump himself, by the way), as well as every member of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, an institution created by Congress to improve airline safety after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. As aviation expert James Fallows points out, this committee was a major reason why American commercial flights have become so safe, and a model of responsible government. “It was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned,” he writes.
Then on January 28, the Office of Management and Budget, which is reportedly under the direct control of Musk cronies, sent out an email offering a “buyout” to every federal employee, in flagrant violation of federal employment regulations. Then, as my colleague David Dayen reported, a separate email was sent to recently hired federal workers (of which there are about 220,000) warning them they may be summarily fired, which is also illegal. The Prospect can confirm that first-year ATCs got that email on Thursday morning.
Working as an ATC even during normal times is a tremendous burden—literally a life-or-death responsibility over thousands and thousands of people every shift. “Air traffic controllers have one of the most stressful jobs there is,” Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, told me. “The idea that now you have this added layer of stress, worried about your future, your job, your career—that is not what we want, especially in a job that is so safety-critical.”
Finally, let’s consider the leadership question. The FAA has no official leadership. The Department of Transportation is now led by Sean Duffy, a former reality TV star and House backbencher with little relevant experience. The Pentagon is led by Pete Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News host with an alleged history of heavy drinking and sexual assault, and no relevant experience whatsoever. And as for the president, a jarringly disheveled Trump delivered a press conference on Thursday in which he ranted incoherently about Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and DEI somehow being to blame.
As Fallows argues, gutting the ASAC by itself would probably not cause a crash in a week, though it would have sooner or later. But doing so and driving out the head of the FAA for getting in the way of Elon Musk’s reckless rocket explosions, and abruptly introducing unprecedented instability and chaos among all ATCs, including threatening the jobs of many … that leading to a crash wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. The government is a complex and delicate system. Letting Elon Musk thrash around inside it like some silage-drunk bull in a red-cape factory will cause untold damage.
All that said, initial evidence suggests that the American Airlines plane was in the right place as it was coming in for a landing, and the military helicopter wasn’t. However, a preliminary FAA report found that ATC staffing was “not normal” at the airport during the crash, with one controller doing jobs normally assigned to two. The details are still being investigated. It’s too early in the process for the crash to be definitively pinned on the policies of Trump and Musk. But if we want more airline disasters, Trump and Musk are on just the right collision course.
