United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby touted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for safeguarding jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration amid cuts within the federal government.
Kirby’s praise comes after an event highlighting the Trump administration’s plans to update the United States’s air traffic control system. When asked how the Department of Government Efficiency and its cost-cutting measures could affect air travel and safety at the FAA, Kirby said that Duffy is the “leading gold star” in navigating DOGE, noting how “caution tape” was placed around the FAA’s jobs for critical functions.
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“And DOGE went and looked, and I think they took about 400 jobs out of over 100,000 jobs,” Kirby said on CBS News Sunday. “Back office kinds of jobs, the kind of things that at any company, that anybody works at are routine, I think, and so at least at the Department of Transportation, I think they’ve done a very effective job of protecting that core safety operational workforce and putting the caution tape around them and really focusing how do we make the back office more efficient, as opposed to taking resources out of the front line.”
Kirby added that the Department of Transportation is “doubling down” on addressing the air traffic controller workforce, which he said is down by about 30%. He said that Duffy and “the entire FAA” are committed to addressing this problem.
Kirby was pressed on why he was optimistic that the Department of Transportation and the FAA would finally address the problem of upgrading the nation’s air traffic control system. The United Airlines CEO highlighted that the funding to fix this has been asked for “upfront” instead of on a yearly basis, and that there are people dedicated to making this happen.
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Last week, the Trump administration was praised for its attempt to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system by the parents of Sam Lilley, an American Airlines pilot who was killed in the Potomac plane crash earlier this year. The crash occurred just after Duffy was sworn in as the new transportation secretary.
On Sunday, Duffy detailed the steps he is implementing to address safety concerns in air travel, including increasing the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers from 56 to 61 and giving them a 20% upfront bonus to stay on the job. While he said it is safe to fly, he expressed concern that major outages such as the recent ones at Newark Liberty International Airport could still pose “a risk to life” and must be resolved quickly.