From article 8 days ago:
…the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring.
Off topic – Cowardice at the New York Times:
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
Paul Krugman has pulled back the veil on hid departure from the NYT. The story is utterly unconventional – a once-great journalistic enterprise no longer has the spine to stand up to the rich and powerful. Krugman still has a spine, so they tried to muzzle him. He left.
That’s the whole story, and it is just like a bunch of other stories in our plutocratic age.
>i>”The FAA’s critical staffing issues started —I am not making this up— with its mass layoffs in 2021 of controllers who refused to take the jabs. The agency has never recovered from that horrible mistake. It remains currently 3,000 controllers under normal staffing levels.
Thus, it is unsurprising that in its last survey in 2023, Pete Buttigieg’s DOT reported that 77% of critical air traffic control facilities were understaffed. The truth is probably closer to all of them.
In the same year, the New York Times reported that near-misses on airport runways (“incursions”) had climbed to an all-time high, and that overworked, burnt-out air traffic controllers were falling asleep on the job and getting drunk at work. To put a number on it, the FAA self-reported 1,750 runway incursions for each of the past three years. By comparison, in 2014, the year the FAA changed its testing standards, the agency reported only 1,278 incursions.”
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/incursions-friday-january-31-2025
Republicans demand contingency plan for air traffic controllers when vaccine mandate kicks in
Congressmen fear FAA terminations due to vaccine mandate ‘will stretch our fragile aviation system to the breaking point ‘
November 8, 2021 5:01pm EST
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/air-traffic-controllers-vaccine-mandate-republicans-demand-contingency-plan
Now there are stories that Trump fired Air Traffic Controllers a week ago. Typical bureaucratic CYA.
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/01/fact-check-trump-administration-did-not-fire-3000-air-traffic-controllers-week-before-fatal-flight-5342-collision.html
Bruce hall: Can you get your data from sources other than FoxBusiness (which from my small interactions is of dubious usefulness)? Here is a report from one of the recently abolished advisory committees: https://www.faa.gov/NAS_safety_review_team_report.pdf
The staffing issues predate 2020-2021 by many many many years.
Menzie was kind enough to mention onlyFox Business as an unreliable source. This is from one of Brucie’s other links:
“Trump’s team faces its first tragedy and performs literally one million times better than Biden’s Administration would have…”
So Brucie spends his time reading whacko blogs? Who’d have guessed, but he can spend his time as he chooses. The problem, for the purposes of making assertions to the rest of us, is that he thinks a MAGA-fan-boy blog is a reputable source. The entire “story” about how the Biden administration “would have” handled the National Airport crash from “Covid and Coffee” is made up. It’s a sycophant fantasy. That’s Brucie’s source.