Source: United States Senator for New Hampshire Jeanne Shaheen
(Washington, DC) – On the Senate floor, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) raised concerns for public safety after the Trump Administration recklessly decided to fire hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) personnel critical to aviation safety. This week’s decision will further strain the system at a time when incidents and near-misses are at a high. Last week, Shaheen and U.S. Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) sent a bipartisan letter calling on Acting Administrator of the FAA, Chris Rochelau to urgently work with Congress to address air safety workforce staffing shortages. You can watch her remarks in full here.
Key Quotes:
- “Many towers and facilities are operating buildings and on equipment that’s five, ten, even fifteen years old and when something goes wrong, they need to know there’s someone on call to fix things because lives literally depend on it. Americans need to know that the skies are secure and that their safety is a top priority.”
- “I think we should do everything we can to make government run efficiently and effectively. But indiscriminately freezing hiring across the board [and] pushing out thousands of civil servants makes that problem worse, not better.”
- “I don’t think people elected Donald Trump to dismantle this country’s air traffic control system. I think they elected him because they wanted to see inflation go down, they wanted to see their grocery prices reduced, they wanted to see help with rental costs, mortgage rates, with energy costs, and what have we seen in the weeks since Donald Trump got inaugurated? No effort to address any of those things.”
Full Remarks as Delivered:
I come to the floor today to call attention to the Trump Administration’s unconscionable disregard for air safety.
Last month, here in Washington, we saw the deadliest commercial aviation event on U.S. soil in over 23 years.
And while this loss of life was horrifying, it was unfortunately not unimaginable.
In recent years, near misses at airports across the country have increased, and the incident at DCA illustrated just how quickly these dangerous situations can take a turn for the worst.
Several times last year, runway incidents were narrowly avoided, due in no small part to the heroic actions of certified professional air traffic controllers who staff our towers.
These controllers are hardworking Americans.
They often log six-day weeks and ten-hour days—and that’s on a good week.
So even before this week’s misguided and, frankly, stupid—I mean, I have to say, I think it’s a stupid decision to lay off hundreds of FAA workers and air traffic controllers who have been overworked and understaffed.
And this is not a new problem.
We’ve known about it for years.
For years in Congress, we’ve been sounding the alarm about the need to invest in our air traffic control workforce.
In last year’s FAA reauthorization bill, we worked in a bipartisan fashion to address this issue—to support our air traffic control workforce so they can do their vital, often lifesaving jobs effectively.
By partnering with the National Air Traffic Control Union and the FAA, we successfully adopted a new staffing method, model, staffing model, in the reauthorization bill, and they’ve been making good progress, but of course we have more work to do.
It’s important to acknowledge that any response to the tragedy at Reagan National Airport must include a commitment to reinforce all parts of our aviation safety workforce.
Controllers would be the first ones to tell you that they don’t work in a vacuum.
The equipment they use is maintained by hundreds of dedicated support personnel who go through years of highly specialized training.
Many towers and facilities operate in buildings and on equipment that’s five, ten, even fifteen years old, and when something goes wrong, they need to know that there’s someone on call to fix things because lives literally depend on it.
Americans need to know that the skies are secure and that their safety is a top priority.
Sadly, I can’t say that the actions we’re seeing from this administration does any of that.
Secretary Duffy said he wants to surge air traffic controller hiring.
I agree with him on that.
We can and we should hire more air traffic controllers, but not at the expense of the rest of FAA’s workforce.
We can hire any number of air traffic controllers tomorrow, but without the dedicated support staff that make their work possible, it wouldn’t matter.
So how is the Administration responding to the American people’s distress over increasingly frequent close calls and, indeed crashes, sadly, like the one we saw in Toronto this week?
Well, over the weekend this administration fired nearly 400 FAA employees, some of them in my state of New Hampshire.
We heard an outpouring of concern over the weekend from controllers, pilots, airlines and passengers who want to know that they’re going to be safe when they fly.
I’m sure the Administration must be hearing this too.
But when asked about the impact of the irresponsible and reckless effort, this is what Secretary Duffy had to say, he said and I quote, “zero critical safety personnel were let go.”
Well, so I’m not sure I understand this.
We’re telling the American people that if a communications system goes down while the plane is approaching the runway, the person who knows how to get it back up and running isn’t critical?
That if the power goes out at an en-route facility while 747s are flying overhead, the eighteen fired maintenance personnel who know how to turn the lights back on won’t be necessary?
That the staffers who develop innovative safety and flight procedures every time there is an incident, to make sure your plane takes off on time and arrives safely, are fair game to be fired?
Because we just lost 13 of them.
And to anyone who’s worried about our national security, good news: According to this administration, the FAA employees working on a classified radar system to detect cruise missiles, aren’t all that important either, and they also were fired.
So I’m going to say that again because this administration thinks that the civil servants at the FAA’s National Airspace System Defense Program are apparently not critical to our safety.
None of this makes me or my constituents sleep better at night, but I bet you it makes our enemies happy.
The Administration has tried to defend this by saying that everyone who [they] fired was probationary.
They’d like you to believe that these are all brand-new employees.
Sort of the philosophy that the last one in, is the first one out.
But that’s not how the system works, and it sure as heck isn’t how you keep Americans safe.
In fact, employees who were promoted based on stellar performance within the last year, many of them who have been with the FAA for ten or fifteen years, are also labeled as probationary employees when they start their new positions.
So in fact, the Administration just fired some of the people with the most experience, not the least.
And this speaks to what is a bigger problem.
Time and again, we’re seeing this happen with so-called “government efficiency,” in quotes, experts.
Listen, like most of us in this chamber, I think we should do everything we can to make government run efficiently and effectively, but indiscriminately freezing hiring across the board, pushing out thousands of civil servants, makes that problem worse, not better.
Last week, hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration were fired without warning.
This week, the Administration is scrambling to try and hire most of them back because they didn’t realize they oversee our nuclear stockpile.
And the Department of Energy fired more than a thousand employees, including three-quarters of the State and Community Energy Program’s office.
Now, I don’t know if the people who are making these decisions in the Administration even know what that office does.
But I can tell you that in New Hampshire we depend on them because they help keep weatherization programs up and running, they support emergency operations in the wake of disasters.
And with folks in New Hampshire dealing with some of the highest home heating costs, who are worried about how they’re going to keep themselves warm this winter, and states around the country still recovering from floods and fires and winter storms, I can’t imagine why anybody would think that it’s a good idea to get rid of the people who are helping make sure those programs operate.
And then on Monday, we found out that dozens of USDA employees, so the Department of Agriculture, who have been working to prevent bird flu, were fired.
And then the White House realized what they had done, they panicked and they tried to bring them back.
Now that’s on top of all of the people around the globe who have been monitoring the bird flu potential epidemic—who have already been fired with the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And just this afternoon, we heard that nearly 500 employees at the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be fired, including almost 60 percent of the CHIPS office.
So the effort that we stood up, that this Congress stood up, to try and make sure we could compete with China, with Taiwan in the production of semiconductors, which are included in almost everything we use from our cell phones to our refrigerators to our cars, 60 percent of those people are now gone.
So who’s going to provide that effort that we need in order to compete with China?
These are the staff that make sure our high-tech semiconductor manufacturing industry stays competitive.
Example after example shows that the firings that Elon Musk has taken credit for have not been thought through.
Either he’s doing it deliberately in an effort to undermine the United States or he’s doing it because he’s so ignorant he has no idea what any of these people do or what their operations do.
Either way, it’s inexcusable.
I heard from a constituent this week who works, who worked, past tense, for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department for 24 years, and she just took a job as a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year.
Her job focused on implementing the Pittman-Robinson Wildlife Restoration Act.
As my colleagues on both sides of the aisle know, this involves conserving bird and wildlife habitat, hunter education and shooting ranges.
Its funds come not from taxpayer dollars, but from excise taxes on firearms, ammunition and archery equipment.
And yet, her job was terminated under the guise of government efficiency.
She has a mortgage; she has kids in college who need health care coverage, but her main ask to me was to help put a stop to these firings and to simply help her get her job back because like most of our public servants, she cares about the mission of her work.
Over and over, we’re seeing this administration take out irresponsible, reckless initiatives with devastating consequences for critical positions without taking a second to think through or learn about what those positions do.
And when things inevitably break as a result, they don’t own up to their mistakes.
Instead, they try to convince you that keeping the lights on at control towers or inspecting airplane engines, making plans to manage some of the busiest airspace in the country really isn’t critical to your safety.
Well, I don’t believe that and I don’t think you should either.
For the sake of the American people, we can and we must do better.
I don’t think people elected Donald Trump to dismantle this country’s air traffic control system.
I think they elected him because they wanted to see inflation go down, they wanted to see their grocery prices reduced, they wanted to see help with rental costs, with mortgage rates, with energy costs and what have we seen in the weeks since Donald Trump got inaugurated?
No effort to address any of those things.
All we’ve seen is an effort at retribution against his perceived enemies, at firing and undermining of services and programs within the government to serve the American people.
For the sake of our citizens, we must do better.
I’m calling on this administration to right this wrong as quickly as possible, before it’s too late.
I yield the floor.