Is Elon Musk Poised to Profit From New Layoffs at the FAA?
The Trump administration has begun mass layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), even as the agency reels from a fiery mid-air collision just outside Washington, D.C., a deadly runway crackup, and mysterious crashes from Pennsylvania to Alaska.
Hundreds of “probationary” FAA employees have received pink slips, amid an Elon Musk-led initiative to slash the size of the federal workforce. But at the same moment the agency is being hollowed out, Musk himself may be poised to profit. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X, formerly Twitter, that employees from Musk’s company SpaceX will be touring an air-traffic-control command center on Monday to “envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.” (Musk responded enthusiastically: “SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”)
The layoffs at FAA are part of a blunt-force downsizing of government. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been firing probationary employees en-masse in agencies ranging from the National Park Service to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Bonneville Power Administration. Probationary employees have typically been on the job for less than a year and do not enjoy the same worker-protections as longer-tenured workers. That does not mean they are inexperienced; many have joined the federal workforce after long careers with the private sector or state governments.
The layoffs at FAA are notable because of the essential public-safety function of the beleaguered agency. The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, representing laid off FAA employees, released a fiery statement denouncing the “draconian action” for disregarding the staffing needs at an agency that is already “stretched thin.” It calls the firings “especially unconscionable” at a moment the nation is reeling from “three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”
Rolling Stone spoke with an FAA employee affected by the DOGE. The employee worked in airman certification, ensuring pilots are medically certified to fly — a critical role, given an existing pilot shortage. “We were already behind,” the employee said. “The pilots already complained that there’s a shortage in getting their medical certification [approved]. It’s just going to be put further behind now.” The employee said the FAA layoffs came as a surprise: “I don’t think we expected it to happen to us, especially with all the aviation crashes and things going on, all the safety issues that are already out there.”
The FAA firings are also remarkable because the agency regulates Musk’s rocket company SpaceX — presenting a significant conflict of interest for the man who has recently been called out in court for exercising king-like powers from his post at DOGE. (The Trump White House has said that it’s up to Musk to decide when he has a conflict of interest that warrants his recusal.)
The FAA’s previous Senate-confirmed administrator Michael Whitaker abruptly left his post just as Donald Trump took office in January, under pressure from Musk, who had publicly demanded his resignation. Musk had clashed with Whitaker after the FAA fined SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars, fumed in an X post last September that the agency was holding him back: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
Now, with Musk acting as the de facto head of government under Trump, that radical reform is under way. The administration’s invitation of SpaceX engineers to help re-imagine federal air-traffic control is giving fresh evidence to critics who believe that the end goal of DOGE is not to create efficiencies within government, but to degrade federal expertise within agencies like the FAA so they are forced to turn to for-profit companies, effectively privatizing essential government services.
In effect, Musk is not only pulling the strings of government power to remove a disagreeable cop from the SpaceX beat, he’s also setting up the company to potentially receive lucrative contracts to overhaul the nation’s air-safety systems. These are among the problems Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pointed in an interview with Rolling Stone as Musk’s “Mount Everest of conflicts.”
Have a tip for our reporters? Contact Tim Dickinson on Signal at Tim.415, and Andrew Perez at aperezrs.15.
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