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Personnel from Elon Musk’s government-downsizing team DOGE were set to visit the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Air Traffic Control command center in Warrenton, Virginia, on Monday, as the Trump administration says it wants to reform the system. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy disclosed the plan in a social media post on Sunday. DOGE personnel will “get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system,” he added. The Trump administration this month reversed course and denied participation to air traffic controllers or security officers of the Transportation Security Administration in a government incentive program to quit. On Saturday, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union said several hundred FAA probationary employees were among thousands fired as part of a campaign by President Donald Trump and Musk to slash the U.S. bureaucracy. The union said the “draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin.” The FAA did not immediately comment on Sunday. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, said on X in response late on Sunday to the planned DOGE visit that the “safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.” Musk previously cited concerns about the recent temporary failure of the FAA’s NOTAM pilot alerting system, housed at the Virginia command center. This month Senator Maria Cantwell called on Duffy to bar Musk from involvement in FAA air space reform, citing conflicts of interest and saying SpaceX was fined by the agency. SpaceX did not comment late on Sunday. The FAA handles an average of 45,000 daily flights and says more than a quarter of the worlds scheduled flights arrive at or depart from U.S. airports. Last week, two U.S. senators called for increased funding and staffing for FAA air traffic after a fatal midair collision highlighted the persistent lack of aviation safety personnel. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and John Hoeven said the FAA is more than 3,500 air traffic controllers short of targeted staffing levels. FAA controller staffing has been flat in recent years and is down 10% from 2012. A January 29 collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people near Washington Reagan National Airport in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in more than 20 years. Duffy says the administration plans to “make sure that America has the most innovative, technologically advanced air traffic control system.” He is reconsidering rules that let air traffic control supervisors cut staffing before the fatal collision. Duffy plans to soon announce steps to surge more air traffic control training and applicants and will visit the FAA Academy in Oklahoma this week to meet air traffic controller instructors and students. David Shepardson, Reuters
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Signaling a major shift in civil rights enforcement, the federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws has moved to dismiss six of its own cases on behalf of workers alleging gender identity discrimination, arguing that the cases now conflict with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, court documents say. The requests by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mark a major departure from its prior interpretation of civil rights law, and a stark contrast to a decade ago when the agency issued a landmark finding that a transgender civilian employee of the U.S. Army had been discriminated against because her employer refused to use her preferred pronouns or allow her to use bathrooms based on her gender identity. Just last year, the EEOC updated its guidance to specify that deliberately using the wrong pronouns for an employee, or refusing them access to bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, constituted a form of harassment. That followed a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that gay, lesbian and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination. Nearly all workplace discrimination charges must pass through the EEOC at least initially and the agencys decision to drop at least six of the cases raises serious questions about whether its protections will continue to extend to transgender and gender nonconforming people going forward. The EEOC is seeking to dismiss three cases in Illinois as well as one in Alabama, New York and California. In each instance, the original complaints allege discrimination against transgender or gender nonconforming workers. The agency cites Trumps Jan. 20 executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two immutable sexes male and female as the reason for why it no longer intends to pursue the cases. The Alabama case charged that Harmony Hospitality LLC discriminated against an employee who identifies as a gay nonbinary male by firing him hours after co-owners learned of his gender identity. The New York lawsuit alleged that Boxwood Hotels LLC fired a transgender housekeeper who complained that a supervisor repeatedly misgendered them and made anti-transgender statements, referring to the housekeeper as a transformer and it. Another suit alleged that Wendys franchisee Starboard Group, Inc. subjected three transgender employees to pervasive sexual harassment at a Wendys restaurant in Carbondale, Illinois, claiming a supervisor demanded to know if one employee had a penis. In another Illinois case, a transgender Reggios Pizza cashier at Chicago OHare International Airport was outed by her manager, called a racist, homophobic slur by coworkers, and fired when she complained. In southern Illinois, at a hog farm called Sis-Bro, Inc., a coworker allegedly exposed his genitals to a transgender employee and touched her breasts. And in Santa Clara, California, the EEOC charged that a Lush Handmade Cosmetics store manager sexually harassed three gender nonconforming employees with offensive physical and verbal sexual conduct.” Former EEOC General Counsel and Professor and Co-Dean Emeritus at Rutgers Law School David Lopez, who served in the agency for more than 20 years, on Friday said in his experience, the EEOC has never dismissed cases based on substance rather than merit until now. For the country’s anti-discrimination agency to discriminate against a group, and say, Were not going to enforce the law on their behalf itself is discrimination, in my view,” Lopez said. “Its like a complete abdication of responsibility. The EEOC’s requests to dismiss the cases come just weeks after Trump dismissed two Democratic commissioners of the five-member EEOC before their terms expired, an unprecedented decision that removed what would have been a major obstacle to his administration efforts to upend interpretation of the nation’s civil rights laws. Had the commissioners been allowed to carry out their terms, the EEOC would have had a Democratic majority well into Trump’s term. The administration also fired Karla Gilbride as the EEOC’s general counsel, replacing her with Andrew Rogers as acting counsel. Shortly after their dismissals, acting EEOC chair Andrea Lucas, a Republican, signaled her intent to put the agency’s resources behind enforcing Trump’s executive order on gender. She announced in a statement that one of her priorities would be defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.” Later, she ordered that the EEOC would continue accepting any and all discrimination charges filed by workers, although complaints that implicate Trump’s order should be elevated to headquarters for review. Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters, Lucas said in her statement. Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. She removed the agencys pronoun app, which allowed employees to display their pronouns in their Microsoft 365 profiles, among other changes. The EEOC in fiscal year 2023 received more than 3,000 charges alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the most since the agency started tracking these charges in FY 2013, and up more than 36% from the previous year, according to the agencys website, which also provides a link for more information on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. But the information appears to have been removed and the link now leads to a blank page with the message: The requested page could not be found. Jocelyn Samuels, one of the Democratic EEOC commissioners who was fired last month, said via email that Trump’s executive order and the EEOC’s response to it is truly regrettable. “The Administrations efforts to erase trans people are deeply harmful to a vulnerable community and inconsistent with governing law,” she said. Sarah Warbelow, vice president of legal at LGBTQ+ rights group Human Rights Campaign, added in an emailed statement: This is the inevitable outcome when the EEOC is weaponized to greenlight discrimination against American workers. Instead of standing up for the rights of everyone to a workplace free from discrimination, including harassment and bias, the Trump administration is making it abundantly clear they will not protect working people.” By Claire Savage and Alexandra Olson, Associated Press The Associated Presss women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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Last week, the Trump administration continued its federal firing spree. After recommendations from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the administration reportedly fired more than 300 of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) workers, then quickly rehired most of them, according to the AP. The chain of events prompted immediate concerns over national security.Pantex Plant, the primary nuclear weapons facility in the United States, in Carson County, Texas, was the target of 30% of the cuts. However, by Friday evening, Teresa Robbins, the acting administrator of NNSA, reportedly issued a memo rescinding the firings. All but 28 of the employees who were dismissed were told they had their jobs back. This letter serves as formal notification that the termination decision issued to you on February 13, 2025, has been rescinded, effective immediately, said the memo, which was obtained by the Associated Press.Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the AP the firings are disruptive to the organization as a whole, as well as the security of the country. I think the signal to U.S. adversaries is pretty clear: throw a monkey wrench in the whole national security apparatus and cause disarray, he said. That can only benefit the adversaries of this country.The NNSA firings were only a fraction of the federal cuts made last week. On Friday, 9,500 federal workers were let go, in addition to the 75,000 who have already taken Trump’s buyout deal. But some say, DOGE is only cutting organizations it isn’t politically aligned withtargeting public health and the environment.For example, the U.S. Forest Service fired around 3,400 recent hires, the National Park Service laid off about 1,000 employees, according to Reuters, as well as nearly half of the probationary workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), told Reuters. There were also job cuts reported at the FDA and the FAA.There have been at least 73 lawsuits filed over Trump’s executive orders since he took office. And on Monday, a national holiday, Reuters reported that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has called an emergency hearing to address DOGE’s recent firings. Chutkan will hear arguments from 14 states in order to decide whether to issue a temporary restraining order against DOGE.Last week, the courts blocked a number of DOGE’s efforts, temporarily barring the organization from accessing sensitive Treasury Department information and payment systems and disallowing the government from blocking federal funding due to a health agency providing gender-affirming services to minors.Over the weekend, Trump pushed back on efforts to block the administration’s efforts to overhaul government spending in a post on social media. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president wrote.The sentiment mimics a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. In the 1970 film Waterloo, Napoleon states, he did not “usurp the crown” but found it in the gutter” and “picked it up with my sword.” The quote continues, “and it was the people . . . who put it on my head. He who saves a nation violates no law.
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