Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by gutting aviation regulators — and almost immediately, saw the US's deadliest air accident in over twenty years happen under his watch.

Now, his Transportation secretary Sean Duffy says the already beleaguered Federal Aviation Administration has just laid off "less than 400" employees, Axios reports, even as the country is beset with a flurry of more high-profile aviation incidents.

And that's bad enough — but wait till you hear which recurring character they're calling in to pick up the pieces.

"Tomorrow, members of [Elon Musk's] SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in [Virginia] to get a firsthand look at the current system," Duffy said in a separate announcement.

Musk professed the seriousness of his latest mission.

"The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter," Musk wrote on X Sunday. "SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer."

Musk meddling with the FAA raises numerous conflicts of interests. His company SpaceX has frequently butted heads with the regulator for halting the launches of its rockets like Starship. Prior to Trump taking office, Musk repeatedly called for the previous FAA administrator, who enforced those decisions that the president's First Buddy didn't like, to resign. Musk eventually got his way.

Is Musk in any way qualified for the job? Launching rockets isn't the same thing as coordinating the tens of thousands of flights that take place in the US every day. The answer is no — but it's not a question that's stopped him from deciding how other federal agencies are supposed to function over the past few weeks.

Paired with the downsizing of the aviation agency, Musk's incursion puts additional scrutiny on the Trump administration's handling of American airspace. The cuts were carried out as part of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency's latest effort to downsize the federal workforce by firing "probationary" employees, or workers who were hired or promoted to their position in the past year.

"Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go," Duffy claimed in his announcement, a post on X-formerly-Twitter, calling the FAA's size of 45,000 employees "staggering."

There's little reason to take Duffy at his word — that he didn't fire any key personnel — as the chaos wreaked elsewhere in government suggests. After firing employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of sweeping layoffs targeting the Department of Energy, Elon's hatchetman scrambled to get some of them back. Why? The Trump lieutenants didn't realize at the time that the men they had just told to buzz off were in charge of safeguarding the US's nuclear arsenal. Seems like a major oversight.

But rest assured. We're sure that the FAA job cuts are being done with the utmost rigor. Right?

"Every one of these folks that they’re letting go performs a job that supports aviation safety in some way shape or form," president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists Dave Spero, a union representing 11,000 FAA workers, told the Washington Post.

More on Trump: Trump Enacts Brutal Cuts at NASA


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