Trump Launches Mass Purge of Air Traffic Control Staff

Donald Trump’s administration has begun indiscriminately culling scores of people who keep air travel safe, despite four deadly plane crashes during his first two months as president.

In a statement published Saturday, David Spero, the president of the AFL-CIO’s Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), said that several hundred employees represented by the organization had been fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct.”

The notices, sent from an “exec order” Microsoft email address, began arriving Friday evening, according to the statement. “It is possible that others will be notified over the weekend or literally barred from entering FAA buildings on Tuesday, February 18,” Spero said in the statement

“These are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. They are our family, friends and neighbors. They contribute to our communities. Many military veterans are among them. It is shameful to toss aside dedicated public servants who have chosen to work on behalf of their fellow Americans,” Spero said.

Last month, Trump baselessly blamed the Federal Aviation Administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for the deadly incident that killed 67 people aboard two aircrafts at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The FAA shortly after released a statement indicating that the air traffic control tower might have been understaffed at the time of the collision. Still, the Trump administration seems intent to assert that excess is the issue.

So far in 2025, there have been four deadly plane crashes in the United States. Before then, the most recent deadly commercial aircraft accident was in 2009.

“Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs,” said Spero, according to CNN. “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.”

The move is part of a wider push from the Trump administration targeting probationary workers in the federal government, who have been employed for less than a year, and therefore lack the job protections of their colleagues. While they are the easiest to get rid of, they will undoubtedly prove difficult to live without.

Elon Musk’s overhaul of the federal government seems to have hit a snag: His Department of Government Efficiency posted classified information on its website. 

Musk’s team posted information about the staff and size of a U.S. intelligence agency on their new website, HuffPost reports. DOGE has been criticized for the level of access into sensitive government departments, including the Treasury Department, but how they got the classified information isn’t clear. 

DOGE.gov was launched Wednesday claiming to give Americans the ability to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” The feature allows users the ability to see data from all federal offices and agencies including head counts, budgets, and the average age of staff. But, the website was supposed to exclude data from U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the fine print at the bottom of its main page.  

The young whiz kids at DOGE appear to have forgotten that part and included information about the National Reconnaissance Office, which is tasked with creating and maintaining satellites for U.S. intelligence. Much of the agency’s activities, including its budget and head count, are classified and aren’t supposed to be available to the public. Plus, how did Musk’s team get access to that information, anyway? Does it have something to do with Musk’s company SpaceX having a $1.8 billion contract to build satellites for the NRO?

Members of the intelligence community would like to know the answer to these questions. One Defense Intelligence Agency employee told HuffPost anonymously that “DOGE just posted secret [Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals] info on their website about [intelligence community] headcount, so currently people are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed.”

While the NRO is the only intelligence agency that DOGE appears to have exposed, this incident doesn’t speak well of the pseudo-agency’s security procedures. The website has already been hacked by Thursday evening thanks to coding vulnerabilities. And since DOGE has gotten into all kinds of sensitive data, every American could be at risk.

Hours after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged that the Department of Health and Human Services would not undergo a staff purge, it did.

The Trump administration laid off half of its Epidemic Intelligence Service, otherwise known as the “Disease Detectives.” The lay off affected 1,260 staff, reported NBC News’s Lewis Kamb.

Top-ranking officials with the CDC, the HHS subagency that oversees the program, told CBS News that the cuts would have a devastating effect on the country’s ability to assess blooming diseases. They are just some of the thousands of probationary workers taking a hit as Elon Musk’s DOGE combs the federal government for possible programs to slash.

“The country is less safe,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, an alumna of the disease research program, told CBS. “These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika.”

Many staffers that go through the program serve on the frontlines of public health responses before later rising through the ranks of the CDC. Another health official observed to the news outlet that many of the fired staffers were early career professionals who had been trained by the agency.

“Now their dream is canceled,” the unidentified official said.

Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday. In an interview with Fox News after he was sworn in, Kennedy pledged that employees who work in service of public health had “nothing to worry about” under his tenure fronting America’s health policy.

“If you’ve been involved in good science, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said. “If you care about public health, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Kennedy’s role as secretary of HHS will have him oversee a budget of nearly $2 trillion and a staff of 90,000 federal employees, as well as hand him the reins of other critical health programs under the fold of HHS, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

The 71-year-old’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda has not been laid out in specifics, but Kennedy has vaguely promised to tackle the nation’s rising obesity rates and SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps), and has claimed he will work the Department of Agriculture to eradicate ultra-processed foods from the American market.

Donald Trump’s attempt to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams keeps escalating, with seven federal prosecutors resigning rather than carry out the order. 

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove gathered the entire Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, which handles all federal public corruption cases, in one room on Friday and threatened to fire those unwilling to dismiss the case against Adams, according to Reuters. He gave them one hour to come up with a name to file the motion, after which one prosecutor did under duress. 

“This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion,” a source familiar with the meeting told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.”

Bove had moved the case to the Public Integrity Section from the Southern District of New York after its acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, resigned Thursday rather than drop the charges. After her, the acting head of the section, John Keller, also resigned. Then, the case was sent to the  DOJ’s criminal division, which handles all federal criminal cases. Its acting head, Kevin Driscoll, refused to drop the case, and handed in his walking papers. 

That wasn’t the end, though. Three other deputies in the Public Integrity Section—Rob Heberle, Jenn Clarke, and Marco Palmieri—also quit their jobs Thursday. Then, the lead prosecutor on Adams’s case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, also resigned and ripped the order in his resignation letter to Bove, who seems to have been tasked with carrying out Trump’s instructions. 

On Thursday, it seemed as though Trump’s DOJ was repeating the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” of the Nixon administration, when the top two leaders of the DOJ resigned rather than file special counsel Archibald Cox on President Nixon’s orders. But the case of Trump wanting to drop charges against Adams in exchange for cooperation on his cruel immigration policy has far surpassed the 1973 incident, with more than triple the number of DOJ resignations taking place. 

These resignations show a commitment by these prosecutors to resist appearing corrupt, and to stand by their strong case against Adams, who has cozied up to the president in the last few months to save his own skin. Will other government officials also fight against Trump’s shameful actions?

The Trump administration on Friday booted the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, citing the newswire’s choice to continue referring to the recently renamed “Gulf of America” as the “Gulf of Mexico.”

“The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America,” wrote White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich on X. “This decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press’ commitment to misinformation.”

Moments after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the newly minted president signed an executive order officially renaming the ocean basin to linguistically claim it as America’s.

“While their right to irresponsible and dishonest reporting is protected by the First Amendment, it does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” Budowich said. “Going forward, that space will now be opened up to the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration. Associate[d] Press journalists and photographers will retain their credentials to the White House complex.”

The Associated Press—an international publication—has defended its decision to defy the Trump administration’s guidance on renaming the body of water by citing its global audience. The wire pointed to its style change for Mount Denali to Mount McKinley under the rationale that Trump has singular authority as the head of the federal government to rename national landmarks.

“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen,” the outlet said in a statement. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

“The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley. The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.”