America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

Like, perhaps there is merit in arguing for more controllers or more pay for controllers, and perhaps that would lead to a safer airspace, but the attempts to implicitly tie the fatal crash to ATC in this case seems pretty poor form, here. What we know from the ATC transcripts[1] already tells us that ATC was aware the helicopter & the plane would be near each other well in advance of the crash; ATC informed the helo, the helo responded that he had the aircraft in sight. Time passed, the ATC gets a proximity warning (labelled as "[Conflict Alert Warning]" in VASAviation's video), ATC immediately acts on it, again reaching out to the helo, the helo again confirms they have the aircraft in sight, and moments later we can hear on the ATC transcripts the crash occur as people in the room witness it and react in horror.

To my armchair commenting self, the ATC controllers seem to be exonerated by the transcript, and I'm going to otherwise wait until an NTSB report tells me why I'm wrong to break out the pitch forks on them.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3gD_lnBNu0

(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)

Also, this doesn't save us any money at all. Congress allocates money and in many cases specifies employment levels. But like the OMB memo says -- taxpayers still have to spend the money for these employees whether they do any work or not.

The reason they are doing this haphazard mess is that their positions are not popular and therefore cannot pass in Congress.

Hmmm… this is short-term correct (at a minimum), but may not be correct long term. Time will tell.

Yes, the money for current jobs has been allocated/budgeted for the fiscal year, and the folks who resign will actually be paid for not working until the end of the fiscal year.

This is standard buyout stuff, and the government does this every year on a smaller scale, usually targeting high-paid, low productivity employees who are eligible to retire.

That said, what happens next fiscal year? The speculation is that the default will be that the positions vacated will basically be lost — as in, the slot/allocation will no longer exist and will not get funded. I imagine exceptions will exist, but this will create a noticeable reduction in the federal workforce if it ends up this way.

Said another way, paying 8 months for no work is cheaper than paying for 5-10 years of unneeded/inefficient work (at least that’s the theory).

> The reason they are doing this haphazard mess is that their positions are not popular and therefore cannot pass in Congress.

As I mentioned above, I think there is broad support on both sides for cutting and/or right-sizing the federal workforce.

Anyone who has worked in or with the federal government knows about instances of gratuitous headcount growth and substantial underemployment in some areas. There exist grifters who maybe put in 10 hours a week on average of very mediocre work for a salary that they absolutely could not earn outside of the government.

These same people also know about areas of the government that are grossly understaffed, seemingly in perpetuity (ATCs, contracting, etc.) and/or extremely underpaid (e.g., anything in tech).

I think it would be trivially easy to get broad support in Congress to implement changes that fix these problems, but that fix doesn’t start with a hastily written “fork you” all-hands e-mail.

All that said, all of this gratuitous motion is basically a drop in the bucket compared to modest and reasonable changes that could be made in social security, Medicare/medicaid, and/or defense spending.