The stakes become painfully real

The invisible guardrails of civil service keep us all safe

Before this week, the United States had not had a commercial airliner crash since 2009, two weeks shy of 16 years ago.

I am feeling the heaviness of this on a whole new level. I suspect most of you feel the same. 67 people are dead. Dozens of families are having the worst week of their lives.

We have to recognize that this tragedy took place in the context of massive turmoil and confusion in the federal government.

The day before the disaster, FAA employees (including air traffic controllers) received an email from the White House titled "Fork in the Road,” encouraging them to resign from federal government service within eight days with an implicit threat that those who remain could be fired.

Read this letter to the editor from an air traffic controller on how that memo was received: “How do you think this letter would sit with anyone in any job? I will tell you that everyone at the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center was talking about that email Wednesday.”

The resignation “invitation” is only one of Donald Trump’s many ongoing attacks on federal employees, aiming to remake the civil service into a political tool to be deployed against his enemies. This politicization project relies on the premise that the federal government — “the bureaucracy” — is useless, unimportant, and incompetent (unless it can be weaponized to advance the political aims of those in power). And, therefore, it can be gutted and stripped of expertise without real consequences.

Read more: Dear Civil Servant

We don’t yet know what caused Wednesday’s catastrophe. But we do know that this is a dangerous moment for potential politicization — of the response, yes (that’s already happening from the White House), but also of the many parts of the federal government whose job it is to prevent this sort of tragedy. We do know the ongoing attempt to politicize the civil service by replacing skilled professionals with political loyalists makes disasters like this exponentially more likely going forward.

We do know that nonpartisan, expert civil servants are Americans who work tirelessly every day to keep all of us safe. When they do their jobs, they are unnoticed. When the guardrail holds as designed, it becomes invisible. The only time we even really know they exist is when things break.

Keeping us safe is hard, complicated, and immensely high-stakes

The United States’ remarkable, best-in-the-world commercial air safety record — again, a disaster like this has not happened in 16 years — does not happen easily.

Thousands of highly skilled, nonpartisan professionals and experts at the Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, Transportation Security Administration and countless other agencies all work together to build an unparalleled safety network.

Every single day, those civil servants keep 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers safely in the air without a single one crashing. Every day for 16 years.

It has not always been so. In 1959, around the time when the FAA was created, one in every 25,000 flights ended in a fatal accident. At today’s air traffic volume, that would mean a fatal crash every 13 hours.

The air traffic control system is a modern marvel, one we’ve come to take for granted.

There are invisible guardrails in countless areas of federal government

The stakes here aren’t just about civil service politicization making air travel less safe. Even if you never get on an airplane, it’s the federal government’s job to keep you safe in more ways than you probably know.

Before the modern FDA, mass accidental poisonings from tainted or dangerous drugs were disturbingly commonplace. In 1937, 105 people across the country died after taking an unsafe formulation known as Elixir Sulfanilamide. Today, 18,000 civil servants at the FDA have essentially regulated that sort of risk out of existence.

In the 1940s, there were approximately 10 road safety deaths per 100 million miles traveled. Today, thanks to a variety of regulatory efforts at the federal and state levels, we’re at just over one-tenth that figure. (That’s true even as the U.S. is actually a dangerous outlier for road safety globally.)

Before the creation of the EPA, mass casualties from air pollution events were relatively common — such as the 1963 and 1966 air inversions in New York City that killed 405 and 168 people, respectively.

Before 1978, children’s toys were often made with lead paint. Today, the work of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) means that parents mostly don’t have to worry about safety in the toy aisle.

Once you start looking, you see these invisible guardrails — maintained by thankless, unseen public servants who take an oath not to the president, but to the Constitution — are everywhere in the federal government. Military and intelligence agencies protect Americans from violent attacks. Nuclear safety regulators have successfully prevented any fatalities connected to nuclear energy since 1961. FEMA coordinates disaster response, OHSA protects workplace safety, the CDC helps prevent disease, federal law enforcement investigates and prosecutes criminal activity, Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and SNAP all keep Americans from going without basic necessities. And the list goes on and on.

This is what federal civil servants do.

A different “fork in the road”: The Trump Administration must cease its efforts to consolidate power at the expense of these invisible guardrails

Let’s return to that email from the White House that was sent to all those civil servants on Tuesday. It included a draft resignation letter and the following instructions:

Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign:

(1) Select “Reply” to this email. You must reply from your government account. A reply from an account other than your .gov or .mil account will not be accepted.

(2) Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.

This memo resembles similar tactics from when Elon Musk took over Twitter, which at the time triggered “massive outages.”

According to the Washington Post, this resignation push was sent by Musk’s team and “blindsided some advisers to President Donald Trump, including officials in the budget office and agencies that typically would be consulted in advance of such monumental changes to personnel and spending policies.”

This is hardly the only impulsive attack on key transportation safety roles in the past two weeks:

• Last Tuesday, President Trump fired the head of the TSA and all members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.

• A week ago, members of Congress raised concerns about Donald Trump’s decision to freeze air traffic control hiring as part of a much larger hiring freeze.

• Days before the Army helicopter’s involvement in this crash, President Trump installed as Defense Secretary a person whose qualifications were so questionable that he’s the first one in history to require the Vice President to break a tie in order to be confirmed.

• The last FAA administrator, Michael Whitaker, resigned the office on Inauguration Day — just one year into his five-year term — after the incoming administration pushed for him to do so.

• Last Friday, Trump illegally fired the inspector general of the Department of Transportation (where the FAA sits) — along with 17 other inspectors general. Their whole job is to “detect and prevent waste, fraud and abuse.” The position remains vacant.

This all has to stop. The path the president and his advisors are on puts American lives in danger.

To be clear, none of this is to discount potential good faith efforts to strengthen and improve the federal government and civil service. Like any hugely complicated machine, there are ample areas of potential improvement and reform. Reform is good!

We should aim to make government work better — find ways to recruit more talent; better retain star performers; improve ways of operating and delivering services; enhance transparency and responsiveness. All of those things would make us safer.

That’s not what Trump’s team is doing with the civil service; they are instead working to "dismantle” it because it might stand in the way of their ability to consolidate power. That makes us less safe.

Healthy democracies demand accountability and self-correction

I don’t really want to focus on the president’s shameful response to this crisis, but let’s do so for a moment. What did he do when one of the core public safety missions of the federal government failed on his watch?

He rushed, with zero evidence, to cast blame on diversity initiatives.

This deliberate scapegoating of vulnerable communities is a smokescreen to disguise both power grabs and venal cruelty. It’s a core tactic in the authoritarian playbook everywhere in the world.

But let us be clear: this scapegoating is a form of deflection. It is an attempt to evade accountability in a moment of profound political vulnerability for the White House. Don’t let them succeed.

A fundamental job of the president, the federal government, and of the civil service is to keep us all safe.

If and when the federal government fails, it requires transparency, accountability, and self-correction. In the coming days and weeks, the White House, the Pentagon, the FAA, and the NTSB owe the American people a rigorous and thorough accounting of what went wrong in this tragedy — including an independent evaluation of whether the ongoing attacks on civil servants played a contributing factor.

And answers are especially urgent here, as the president has raced to upend the very agencies, systems, and personnel tasked with preventing this sort of thing from happening.

Things can get worse. They likely will.