Month: February 2025

The Trump administration fired hundreds of employees with the Federal Aviation Administration over the weekend. The FAA has about 50,000 employees and is the largest division of the Department of Transportation. The firings come after President Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – DOGE — an advisory commission that is targeting U.S. government agencies for massive layoffs.

According to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) union, “several hundred” workers received termination notices on Friday. The firings at the FAA do not include air traffic controllers but they may include engineers and technicians; instead, the terminated FAA employees were probationary workers hired or promoted within the past year like other workers let go in other federal agencies. USA Today reported the number in the FAA was about 400.

The union representing the employees called the firings a “hastily made decision” that would increase the workload of a workforce already stretched thin. David Spero, the national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, AFL-CIO, said in a statement: “This decision did not consider the staffing needs of the FAA, which is already challenged by understaffing. Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X that Elon Musk’s DOGE team members “will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.”  Duffy later said on X that he “talked to the DOGE [‘department of government efficiency’] team” and “they are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system”.  Musk later reposted Duffy’s remarks, saying his department will “aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system”.

The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the cause of a Jan. 29 collision near Washington, D.C., that killed everyone aboard a commercial American Airlines flight and an Army Helicopter. In all, 67 people died, making it the deadliest U.S. air crash in nearly 25 years. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted on social media Monday that “the flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?”

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday in the hopes of undergoing negotiations over wars in Ukraine and Gaza, without any participation from European leaders or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rubio was expected to meet with Kremlin officials in Riyadh to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and its future, joined by Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz and U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lead spokesman Dmitry Peskov said its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, presidential aide Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, who leads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, will be part of Moscow’s team.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr, who is currently in the neighboring United Arab Emirates on a scheduled trip to boost humanitarian support for Ukraine, had previously stated that his country will not consider a peace deal where it was not included in the negotiations. Zelenskyy told NBC News that he would “never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine,” adding there is not “any leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us.”

Meanwhile, European leaders held an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday after the Trump administration said they would be excluded from talks with Russia to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. The leaders of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the European Union met at Paris’ Elysee Palace for the talks on the continent’s security quandary. NATO secretary general Mark Rutte also attended.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said in a statement that the gathering of several key European leaders aimed to address “the situation in Ukraine and security issues in Europe” by “bringing together all the partners interested in peace and security” in the region.

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