They’re leaving because in the Brave New World of DOGE, the atmosphere is so toxic that those who can leave and take their expertise with them are choosing to do just that. It’s not going to help anything, but it’ll sure make a lot of things worse - just the way Elmo wanted it.
None of the recent cuts had any rational basis - they were purely ideological. Trump is trying to turn the civil service into a bunch of goose-stepping robots loyal to him, not the Constitution or any ethical standards. Rational people won’t tolerate that.
The FAA seriously needs to get its priorities straight. While there is an apparently never-ending staffing crisis in ATC causing delays and mid-air collisions, the FAA apparently has plenty of time for “administering” sub-one-pound drones.
And while airliners and other aircraft are sitting on the ground waiting for the FAA’s glacier-like registration process FAA staff is (or was) “working from home” because that was (according to some folds here) “just as efficient”.
And while the certification of 777X and newer versions of the 737 is waaaayyyyyy behind schedule, the FAA has plenty of time for part 91 paperwork. A friend of mine is reconstructing a Cessna 140 and called the FSDO with a question. Subsequently 3 (!) inspectors spent half a day to travel to my friend’s hangar to chit-chat and provide “guidance”.
All the apologists here can say whatever they want and blame whomever they want, but the FAA is a mess for so many reasons. And non-productive employees are a big part of the problem.
I worked 29 years in air traffic at the 3rd busiest airport TRACON in the country. I don’t recall anyone “goose-stepping”, acting like robots, or screaming “this is unconstitutional”, But I do remember working radar short-staffed virtually forever, but you know what group was never short-staffed? Management and staff, they were always overflowing with people. The sad part about it, most of them came from the controller ranks and could not wait to let their proficiency and currency lapse so they never had to work traffic again. You could have furloughed a third of them and no one would have ever noticed them being gone. So save your TDS for someone who cares, you always showcase all the problems but never have a solution.
Yeah, you’d probably have noticed if the people who did all the airspace and procedure design, did the engineering and technical work need to spec and deliver new systems, maintained them, and got everybody hired and through training suddenly went away. A lot of controllers are blissfully oblivious (if not openly contemptuous…) about everything it takes to keep the system running besides controlling. Perfectly understandable - if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But there’s a lot of good and necessary work going on outside control rooms - and I’ve been on both sides of it, as well as up to my eyeballs in safety issues. There’s no way that a group like the DOGE kiddies, completely ignorant about every aspect of both civil service in general and specific agency operations, obligations, and responsibilities, is going to parachute in and start making sensible decisions two days later. They’ve done a lot of damage, and FAA is not going to benefit by having lots of good and experienced people decide to just get out rather than fight with organizational vandals. Let me be clairvoyant here: Duffy’s “whole new system in three years” plan ain’t gonna happen. No way, no how, nope. It’ll happen right after Trump’s bigger and better health plan, due in two weeks from 2017.
They generally seem to start from “My job sucks, so yours should, too.” I worked remote for years as a safety investigator, Most of your actual work is remote, too, so dragging yourself in and out of an office each day only added dragging yourself in and out of an office each day. I did work fewer hours, though, since I had to catch the train at the end of the day instead of carrying on working like I did at home. My wife works remote for a law firm, and frequently WAY outside of the time she gets paid for. You do what you have to do to get the job done. “Where” isn’t the most important thing by any stretch.
Thank you for this post. It’s a relief to learn that the FAA is the one Federal organization not burdened by bloated bureaucracy and runs like a Swiss watch. No waste or excessive management overhang to trim. FAA HR is a lean, mean hiring machine; all candidates are hired based on technical qualifications and add real value to the FAA mission. Nothing to see there, it’s all good.
Any organization can be examined for improvement. Nothing wrong with that at all. But unless you’re obsessed with doing it wrong, you don’t do it like DOGE. Setting a bunch of ignorant flying monkeys loose on the government has worked about as not-well as expected - and all to save an underwhelming 2% of the annual budget (if you believe Musk, which is a bad bet…) in exchange for decades of damage. Woohoo.
Here’s a thought: “RTO” was an idea pushed by the politically powerful and influential realty office space management companies. These groups were property investors — just like our president — and they “had his ear.” These types of companies — for obvious reasons — were near-and-dear to our president’s heart.
These realty groups saw their current and future property contracts tanking because of telework.
… it had zero to do with “lazy government workers.”
If I was to wager a guess, I’d say that productivity has declined - precipitously. Burning gas in bumper to bumper traffic and paying tolls adds zero to worker efficiency.
Technology - like telework - is a “force multiplier.” It’s still not clear — why all of a sudden — this is no longer true.
Yup. At home, I wrote reports on a laptop connected to the mother ship via a docking station and a VPN. When I had to go to the office, I took my laptop in, put it in a docking station, wrote the same reports, no VPN. Woohoo.