Has nothing todo with it..

https://x.com/PeterHamby/status/1884827909954621502

"Mary Schiavo — former Dept. of Transportation inspector general — with a reality check on CNN:

“Air traffic controllers do not come and go with the change of an administration … The politics of the situation should have had no impact whatsoever on air traffic controllers”"

In the opinion of one person who has a grand total of zero minutes of experience of all US Gov. employees being offered resignation leters.

The GP comment was about accident investigators rather than air traffic controllers but the consquences are the same, a lot of regular gov. employees are distracted by a current situation with no prior occurrence.

"A reality check"?

FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.

Which Trump is roundly ignoring because he wants to appoint every agency with burrowed MAGA loyalists, top to bottom.

If you haven't been following what this administration has said and done with a painful degree of critical focus, it's probably bleaker than you imagine.

> FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.

"Trump reclassifies thousands of federal employees, making them easier to fire":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-execut...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy/Career_appointment

> The federal civil service system exists to ensure that hiring and firing decisions are based on merit, not political favoritism. Legal and procedural standards, enforced by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, require managers to provide a reason for taking disciplinary action, give employees the right to respond and mandate that decision-makers consider both sides before taking action against a federal employee. This system is crucial for maintaining fairness; it prevents arbitrary and unjust terminations.

> Before this system was established, many new administrations fired their predecessors’ civil servants and replaced them with donors and cronies. This practice led to instability and inefficiency within the federal government. To address this issue, Congress established merit-based hiring and firing procedures that apply to civil servants who are not political appointees, ensuring that government agencies are staffed with qualified individuals who can effectively serve the public.

* https://thehill.com/opinion/5107846-federal-employees-civil-...

Trump et al seem to want to go back to the system where folks can be hired and fired at will:

* https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...

Do a search for "Schedule F" for more on the topic.

Trump's written order threatening the jobs of FAA employees does exist.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/keep...

And this is in the context of a Republican argument that DEI hiring at the FAA for Air Traffic Controllers is a big problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240308145022/https://ag.ks.gov...

I don't believe the environment Mary Schiavo experienced in the 1990s was the same as today's environment.

Ronald Reagan?

wasn't the situation then that the air traffic controllers walked off on strike, so new replacements had to be made to keep planes flying, which was realized by firings? (i was pretty young then, but that's what i remember reading)

IIRC, rather then negotiate with the experienced union controllers until an agreement was made - they brought in inexperienced non-union controllers..

source: my uncle was an ATC during the strike. I believe he was a shift lead/supervisor and was NOT part of the walk out. He was appalled at how bad the replacements were and was going crazy trying to get them up to snuff.

That had always been the case. The new administration has already done a lot of things differently from previous administrations.

It was largely a matter of precedent, rather than law. It's unclear how much of the current path is legal. And, of course, whether it's good judgment is completely orthogonal to whether it's legal.

Like Clinton did? Which ended up being great? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-buyo...

> While committed to cutting the work force, we want to do it in a humane way. We faced the same dilemma that confronted many private companies; they needed to downsize but wanted to avoid firing large numbers of loyal employees. Many of them have given people an incentive to leave by offering "buyouts." We wanted to do the same.

This time around it seems less targeted, which gives the perception that it is not really about streamlining, feel free to prove me wrong though.

From the document you linked: > The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.

> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.

this isn't how it's being done now

It's not even a buyout. They have to work for those 8 months; it's not a severance package.

There's also no evidence they have the money to pay if the offers were in good faith. Combined with the fact the two people who came up with the idea have a history of deciding not to pay and instead go to the courts to avoid paying

From what I have seen, if a worker agress to it, they agree they could be reassigned or terminated early (and thus not paid the same or at all). Seems like a trap.

Replying to myself days later to correct this statement: I did learn later on that the deferred resignation does mean that the employee is free to stop working once they submit the resignation, and will continue to be paid for 8 months regardless of whether or not they continue working. I don't think it was clear from the initial "buyout" offer, but it was clarified in later communications.