On the recordFebruary 20, 2025
starting last week, the Trump administration began firing hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees. Today, we had a hearing in the Commerce Committee to talk about what kind of a key Deputy Secretary we need at the DOT, and we asked questions about this. But what is perplexing is, while the American people were watching in horror as a Delta Airlines plane flipped over on the Toronto runway, President Trump was focused instead on purging dedicated FAA employees from the Federal workforce, something that I believe makes us less safe in the skies. Among those fired were aeronautical information specialists, legal instrument examiners, telecommunication specialists--all of whom played a key role in supporting the work of air traffic controllers. In fact, there was a story today in Politico. The headline is, ``Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us.'' That is a quote from the article. And inside the article, a statement, reading from the article, ``One of the people last week let go was an aeronautical information specialist, a member of a team outside Washington whose job it was to create maps and highways in the sky, the pre-planned routes that pilots control and controllers use to guide airplanes.'' So it is very perplexing that we have had these accidents, and now, we have an administration that wants to cut people at the FAA.…





