Transportation secs duel over who’s to blame for plane crashes

The current and former US secretaries of transportation are playing the blame game following a rise in aviation crashes since the beginning of the Trump administration.

Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, peppered X with questions Monday, asking, “The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?”

Buttigieg’s enquiries followed a string of plane crashes throughout the nation, beginning on January 29 when an American Airlines plane and a Black Hawk military helicopter collided above the Potomac River in Washington, DC, resulting in the death of sixty-seven people. The latest occurrence was hours after Buttigieg’s post, when a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis flipped over upon landing in Toronto amid strong winds.

President Trump’s newly appointed secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, snapped back at Buttigieg after the crash by pointing the figure back at him. Duffy accused Buttigieg of failing to update the “World War Two-era air traffic control system” as his focus was on using the Department of Transportation as a “slush fund for the green new scam.” He also criticized his predecessor by saying that over 90 percent of Buttigieg’s workforce were working from home. 

Duffy then directly addressed one of Buttigieg’s queries by saying that only 400 of the FAA’s 45,000 employees were let go since the beginning of the Trump administration. He clarified that all of the laid-off employees were hired less than a year ago — and none of them worked for air traffic control. 

Buttigieg pushed back on Duffy’s claim that that many of his workforce worked from home. He then asked if “the hundreds of FAA personnel he just fired were important to safety?”

Duffy has yet to publicly reply. The new transportation secretary had announced the day before the crash that under the direction of Trump, he would work with SpaceX to produce a “new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world.” SpaceX CEO and DoGE chief Elon Musk reacted to the announcement saying, “The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”