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Elon Musk’s crew of DOGE henchmen has been taking an ax to the federal government this week, hacking away at agencies like OPM, USAID, and the U.S. Treasury. But now it looks like it’s the FAA’s turn. And it may give you pause if you have any plans to buy airline tickets in the near future.
“Big News – Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tweeted Wednesday.
Elon Musk confirmed he was going to unleash his little dipshits on FAA, elaborating even further than Duffy had, while using a combination of words that don’t typically go together.
“With the support of President @realDonaldTrump, the @DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system,” Musk tweeted. “Just a few days ago, the FAA’s primary aircraft safety notification system failed for several hours!”
Did you catch that combination of words, “rapid safety upgrades.” It’s not something you typically see in succession, since safety typically involves slow and methodical processes to implement properly. But they do things a little differently at DOGE. Which is to say, they do things poorly and without much thought for the consequences.
For some reason, Trump nemesis and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got into the debate over DOGE’s involvement at FAA, writing, “They have no relevant experience. Most of them aren’t old enough to rent a car. And you’re going to let them mess with airline safety that’s already deteriorated on your watch?”
Clinton is, of course, referring to the collision between an American Airlines plane colliding with a helicopter in Washington D.C. last week, killing 67 people. As well as the small plane crash near Philadelphia that killed 7 and damaged homes.
But Duffy, a man with no relevant experience in transportation beyond appearing on a reality TV show called Road Rules Challenge, wasn’t going to take this lying down. Duffy responded to Clinton’s tweet with “Madam Secretary, with all due respect, ‘experienced’ Washington bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling. You need to sit this one out.”
At least he wrote, with all due respect, right? It’s better than what Trump would’ve written, we suppose. But it’s still kind of funny, when you consider that Duffy only got his job as Secretary of Transportation because he’s loyal to Trump and will do anything he says.
What do Musk and his gang of DOGE workers have planned for FAA? That part isn’t clear yet. But Musk has been tearing through the government in a way that experts warn is both clearly illegal and will be damaging for generations to come. Not only is Musk deep inside the U.S. Treasury’s payments system, but he’s trying to push out as many federal workers as possible why unilaterally declaring entire agencies will no longer exist.
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown Law School, told the Washington Post this week.
Efforts to hold Musk accountable to the law have so far been in vain. The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted on Wednesday to subpoena Musk, but that failed 19-20. And while the Democrats have finally started to talk tough, they haven’t made some of the most drastic moves at their disposal, such as objecting to unanimous consent, a maneuver that would only take one senator to accomplish and would grind the business of the Senate to a halt.
Democrats haven’t used these aggressive tactics yet, but here’s hoping they pull their heads out of their asses soon. The country is being chopped to pieces by a billionaire oligarch and there’s not going to be much left if they don’t put a stop to it soon.
