On Saturday, President Trump announced plans to deploy ICE agents to help with security at airports across the country, given all of the TSA workers who are either quitting or not showing up because they haven’t been paid for weeks. Last night, an Air Canada airplane collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing two pilots and hospitalizing scores of passengers. These twin crises are separate but related: They are both the result of an approach to governance that neglects the work of governing.
Anyone with even a passing interest in air-traffic safety knows that near misses have grown more frequent. In the New York area, there have been two close calls this month alone: An Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 nearly collided with a FedEx Boeing 777 in Newark last Tuesday, and another Air Canada flight nearly hit an EVA Air 777 Boeing at John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 12. When a tragedy is averted, some presume that the system is working, a phenomenon in disaster management known as the “near-miss fallacy.” But many complex systems on the brink of failure leave clues, and near misses are flashing red lights.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Fox News host who spent the weekend blaming Democrats for airport-security lines, is not in fact in charge of airport security. He is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration, which handles air traffic and mishandled the Air Canada landing at LaGuardia. If he didn’t know before, he hopefully knows now that what happened yesterday was not simply an outlying tragedy, but the inevitable culmination of long-standing safety concerns and shortsighted funding cuts.
[Read: American aviation is near collapse]
Duffy has assured the public and Congress that the administration’s sweeping cuts to federal agencies and workers did not directly affect air traffic controllers, who have been in short supply for years. But DOGE cuts included hundreds of FAA workers, which has compromised air-traffic safety. Early accounting suggests that only one air traffic controller may have been on the job at LaGuardia at the time of the crash yesterday, given that the control-tower recording features only one voice clearing taxiing on runways as well as takeoffs and landings. Whoever was in the tower was also distracted by an emergency on another airplane that required the fire truck.
The administration’s hasty move to deploy ICE agents at airports will likely do little to make life easier or safer for travelers, or do much to endear this controversial arm of the Department of Homeland Security to more Americans. The DHS, which handles the TSA, is still reeling from the exit of Kristi Noem, its ineffective and attention-seeking former secretary, who expensively cosplayed her way through her tenure and trained an entire homeland-security apparatus on the threat posed by undocumented dishwashers and their young children. Somehow, no one at DHS predicted that a funding fight over ICE’s aggressive conduct might create a problem with TSA workers not showing up to work because they aren’t getting paid. The fact that anyone at the top is shocked by snaking security lines at airports is of a piece with the administration’s rather cavalier approach to contingency planning. (See also the war in Iran.)
The Trump administration has devoted this term to manufacturing fake threats and neglecting quite a few real ones, such as the steady erosion of departments and systems designed to protect people, including airline passengers. Public safety is not a given—and Americans are learning that it is no longer something that they can take for granted.
