In response to a court order, the Federal Aviation Administration has reinstated 132 employees it had fired in February amid a broad effort by the Trump administration to curtail the size of the US government.
In response to a court order, the Federal Aviation Administration has reinstated 132 employees it had fired in February...
ATC are career conditional for a LONG time. In many cases the people they fired were certified controllers, fully checked out and working airplanes by themselves.
When you're close to a system you see just how bad some things are, and how poorly and incorrectly "reporting" gets it. I imagine there are a LOT of government agencies being shut down by attrition that actually SAVE society money, compared to the cost of not having them.
These people are getting paid since February 15th when they were fired. Meanwhile, many of these positions were being backfilled by air traffic controllers working overtime, most of the time not doing as well of a job as the person who was "fired" in the first place.
So to recap: Elon and Trump fired well qualified and necessary employees, continued to pay them after they left, then over paid someone else to do their job, but worse, making us all less safe and simultaneously overworking an already notoriously overworked group of ATCs who have one of the most stressful jobs in the world.
I dunno about you guys, but I'm not sure this Department of Government Efficiency is actually very efficient...
The whole process "DOGE" is doing is like what he did to Twitter: just start unplugging stuff until things break and then plug the last thing back in. Except this time, instead of brief interruptions to the racism app, it's real people's lives being affected both directly (the employees being fired) and indirectly (the citizens who rely on these services).
Could you imagine going back to work for a place that tried to fire you a few weeks ago? And is still actively appealing a court decision to try to fire you again?
They panicked when they realized they sent the "fork in the road" email to controllers and quickly back pedaled. But as far as I know, they haven't freaked out and tried to rehire these people. This took a court order from a judge - and it sounds like the administration is trying to appeal it.