Comments by "Bri Ryder" (@nesseihtgnay9419) on "Forbes Breaking News"
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these federal workers dont even want to work!!!! they are just sitting at home on their asses doing nothing. why are you lying?
There’s been a lot of chatter, especially on platforms like X, linking recent plane crashes to the mass layoffs of FAA workers under the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts in early 2025. The sentiment is real—people are worried, and some posts flat-out blame the layoffs, pointing to the 400 FAA employees cut in mid-February 2025, just weeks after a major crash near Reagan National Airport that killed 67. The idea is that losing these workers, even if they were probationary (less than two years on the job), has weakened safety oversight, leading to more accidents.
But let’s dig into whether this holds up. The FAA and the Department of Transportation have pushed back, saying the layoffs—about 1% of the FAA’s 45,000-strong workforce—didn’t touch “critical safety roles” like air traffic controllers. They insist the cuts targeted newer hires, not seasoned staff keeping planes in the air. Data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows 16 fatal accidents in 2025 so far, which is actually below the average of 20 per month from past years, though the death toll spiked with that January Potomac River collision. High-profile incidents—like the Pennsylvania crash on March 9, 2025, where five survived, or the Philadelphia medevac jet crash in January that killed seven—fuel the narrative, but correlation isn’t causation.
Experts and officials, like Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, have pointed to pilot error as a bigger factor in recent incidents, not staffing shortages. For instance, the Potomac crash involved a pilot ignoring air traffic control, and the Chicago near-miss on February 25 was similar. The FAA’s been understaffed for years—90% of U.S. airport towers were already short before these layoffs, per CBS News—so the 400 cuts, while not ideal, aren’t a sudden gutting of capacity. Plus, aviation safety’s a complex beast: maintenance, weather, and human factors often outweigh staffing levels in crash stats.
That said, the layoffs haven’t helped morale or public trust—polls show confidence in air travel dipping to 64%. Critics, including unions like the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, argue that even probationary roles (e.g., safety assistants, mechanics) matter for the system’s health. Losing 12% of aeronautical-information specialists, who update navigation charts, could theoretically create risks down the line. But there’s no hard evidence yet—crash investigations take months, and the NTSB hasn’t linked any 2025 incident directly to the layoffs.
So, no, it’s not “true” in a proven sense—plane crashes haven’t been conclusively tied to the FAA layoffs. The timing looks bad, and people are understandably spooked, but the data and expert takes suggest it’s more about pilot mistakes and long-standing issues than a sudden staffing crisis. Still, the optics are rough, and the debate’s far from settled. Keep an eye on those NTSB reports—they’ll tell the real story eventually.
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