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In any event, unless the weather was IMC, where neither aircraft can see because of weather/cloud, which I'm deducing is not the case if they were allowed to maintain visual separation, the ultimate responsibility for maintaining separation is with the pilot(s) .. But as I posted, we should not have this happen anywhere in the United States in 2025 & much less the nation's capital. Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work, but I have a feeling that will be the end of DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.


Just so ya know, "get to work" is the opposite of what the federal agencies are being told just at the moment.

I'm sure the accident investigators are very compassionate and dedicated to their jobs, and will do everything they can to resolve this and prevent future accidents. But overall the mood in DC isn't great just at the moment, as everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.


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Maybe if the orders weren't so ineptly or maliciously ambiguous and overly broad, then people would have more confidence that safety critical jobs aren't being cut.


The "Hiring Freeze" seems to clearly and explicitly exclude cases like this. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/hiri...


What’s ambiguous about this order?


I think they really do want to hollow out the federal government, and we should expect things like planes falling out of the sky as part of that.

Given the release of this memo[1] offering the buyout of any federal employee who wants to step down, what I think we are looking at is the Musk-Vance-Thiel axis of the MAGA movement is implementing Curtis Yarvin's "R.A.G.E." plan to install a king dictator atop a neo-feudalist executive branch. I wish those words weren't as crazy as they are, but I mean, what else am I supposed to believe when the crazy plan Yarvin is pushing[2] is coming out of the Office of Personnel Management, which is being run by a billionaire who just gave a neo-Nazi salute behind the presidential seal?

  Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Yarvin gave a talk about "rebooting" the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym "RAGE", which he defined as "Retire All Government Employees". He described what he felt were flaws in the accepted "World War II mythology", alluding to the idea that Hitler's invasions were acts of self-defense. He argued these discrepancies were pushed by America's "ruling communists", who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists". "If Americans want to change their government," he said, "they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."[39]
They're trying to do a greenfield government like it's a startup, turning the US government into a company where they are the shareholder lords who own everything and get to decide who the king dictator is, while we are the employee peasants who don't own shit and have a say in nothing. I really wish that weren't my conclusion but those are the literal words of the guy whose plan they are doing. Quote: "get over their dictator phobia". So what else am I supposed to conclude?

[1] https://fedscoop.com/trump-federal-workforce-buyouts-legal-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#:~:text=Under%20...


> I think they really do want to hollow out the federal government, and we should expect things like planes falling out of the sky as part of that.

I am no fan of Trump but it is possible that 1) The Federal government has grown far too large and is bloated in many areas. And 2) The size of the Federal government can be reduced while maintaining safety and essential services.

I don't know if the current administration is doing or even can do that but it's hard to deny there is a very real problem or that the problem is, at least in concept, solvable.

That said, I highly doubt this tragic accident was caused by or related to the change of administration last week. It could just as easily have happened two weeks ago under the prior administration. It's unfortunate that it seems to have become politically polarized (by partisans on both sides) even before the flames had been extinguished.


I think that would be a reasonable take if the people implementing this plan (Musk, Thiel, Vance) weren't literally citing Curtis "a government is just a corporation that owns a country" Yarvin as a thought leader.

Although you are right they're trying to do what Musk did with Twitter, but the thing is that didn't go very smoothly, and he thinks it went great. At Twitter it meant downtime and also making users feel unsafe. At the federal level, regardless of the motivation (reigning in spending or a neo-feudal takeover), it will mean planes falling out of the sky, an increase in fraud and scams, civil rights violations, and so forth.


I'm not as familiar with Yarvin as I am with partisan media narratives. My problem with these kinds of insinuations, is that one quote or citation of Yarvin is easily spun into the conclusion that the incoming administration is following all of Yarvin's writings, no matter how obscure.

Partisan journalists are incentivized to selectively quote Yarvin's works to scare their partisan audience. The wildest and most fearful conclusions gain the most clicks and views.


We are living in the parallel universe where Curtis Yarvin is being interviewed by the NYT, which is politely asking him to give his thoughts on the pros and cons of slavery in the US. I wish it were true that Curtis Yarvin was obscure and that his friends in the government were unfamiliar with most of his odious ideas. Unfortunately, that’s not the live scenario.


You’re throwing around all these buzzwords like “dictator” and “feudalist,” but what’s the word that refers to government employees openly declaring “Resistance” to agenda of the duly elected president? Because that’s not “democracy” either, right?

Trump literally campaigned with Musk on this very issue. He explained at length what he was going to do in long form podcasts and in lengthy rallies. Musk was Trump’s closer in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. And people voted for that.

Trump made his case to the American public that, no matter who wins the election, democrats control the government through their control of the bureaucracy. And it’s a reasonable case: do you truly believe the federal workforce will implement Trump’s immigration policies with the same enthusiasm as Biden’s DEI policies? Trunk made this case to voters, with Musk at his right hand, and voters hired him to do this. A plurality trust the billionaire who is on their side over two million federal workers who, although not individually powerful, collectively wield enormous power.


> You’re throwing around all these buzzwords like “dictator”

To be clear, I am not the one throwing the word "dictator" around, that would be Curtis Yarvin. I am repeating his words. These people believe they are implementing a dictatorship, and it's not a buzzword, it's their stated goal. I don't even need to exaggerate it, I just need to quote them.

I realize that Trump did in fact campaign on being a dictator, but I also am listening to a lot of people who voted for him, who don't really feel they voted for a dictatorship.

I mean, do you agree with the statement "If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia."?


> everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.

How do you know this?


Because I live here.


I also live here but that doesn’t give me crystal ball-like insight into what every single fed and fed-adjacent employee is feeling. It’s a fairly big city! Do you work in the federal space? I have acquaintances who do and their mood doesn’t quite match the hysteria you see on e.g. the regional subreddits.


I live far away from DC, but my friends in two different federal agencies (stationed outside of DC) are partly bemused and partly shocked at how unprofessional the emails and new directives they are receiving from this new administration are. All of their colleagues are expressing the same sentiment (and my friends usually do not fraternize after work with their colleagues, but they have all been doing that after work just to cope with what is going on). Your contrarian-ness about the 'hysteria' is misplaced. Professional and dedicated federal workers are deeply concerned.


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> I have no stake here

I don't want to sound flippant, but if you have no familiarity with a system and what it does, then you won't be able to make any useful judgments about it. This new administration has made it clear that they do not know the function of these agencies but have decided to destroy their structures. As a concerned bystander who has some knowledge and stake in them continuing to function, it is deeply painful to witness


They're blindly and foolishly tearing down Chesterton's fence.


That's a totally reasonable opinion, I'm just pointing out that "professional and dedicated" workers being concerned is not evidence of anything because it has many possible interpretations. Only if you've already bought into a particular system being well designed and justified does it necessarily entail something negative.


This may be true, but it doesn't excuse psychopathic behavior on the part of public servants given the job of managing these agencies. This isn't supposed to be The Hunger Games.


Damn near every one I know is either worried about being fired OR is unclear on what their agency should be doing in light of the flurry of ambiguous EOs from Trump. The best case seems to be "my office is clusterfuck, but I'm a contractor in SCIF, so I guess I'm ok for now."


So basically you don't know, but are being dramatic. NSA and CIA and DoD in general?

The reason i say this is you mention experience and skill but ignore whether such people are in _roles_ that need to exist at all, which is what is being questioned, not the worth of individuals in those roles.


Presumably because Trump just offered an 8month severance package to all fed workers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqe3le3z4o

> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.


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.


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> 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


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.


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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.


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.


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.


"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.


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.


> Hopefully DOT and FAA get to work

they were just told to resign en masse as a loyalty test (the memo literally uses the word "loyal"), so yeah, no


> The reformed federal workforce will be built around four pillars:

[…]

> 4. Enhanced standards of conduct: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination.

[…]

> 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”.

* https://www.opm.gov/fork


> Employees who engage in unlawful behavior

Convicted felon, that sort of thing?


Only if you’re president


I didn’t know. this line is really upsetting people tonight.


I’m curious, how many people in your business were elected to their jobs?

Do you think people should be electing the ATC agents?

Also, what’s your opinion about the entire cabinet, Elon Musk, and the likes, all of whom are also unelected?


Kamala was also unelected for her position as the democratic candidate for the 2024 election.

My opinion is that was a really dumb idea that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the democrats.

And the cray crays (“Elon is a Nazi”) have the nerve to accuse the other side of being the threat to democracy. Compared to the non-election anointing of Kamala, other unelected people are just noise. You know I’m right. All of this is just fallout from the unelected candidate being pushed on unwanting voters.


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The Westminster tradition is for the public service to give "frank and fearless advice" [1] in the interests of the nation. It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders. As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?

Of course the above is theoretical. In practise governments demand loyalty to themselves and there is little peril to Ministers as there now seems to be little repercussion for denying responsibility.

[1] https://vpsc.vic.gov.au/about-vpsc/updates-from-the-commissi...


> As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?

Both systems rely on the people in charge being told okay with being told "no, this is a bad idea".

The Ministers/Secretaries/Executive may think their plan(s) are a good idea and the civil service are being obstructionist.

(Of course the civil service could be wrong as well.)


The U.K. had a documentary in the 80s about civil servants handling ministers, for better and worse.


Was it called "Yes Minister"? :-)


> Was it called "Yes Minister"? :-)

That show was more than a little bit of propaganda:

> In a 2004 documentary, Armando Iannucci compared Yes Minister to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in how it has influenced the public's view of the state. Although Lynn comments that the word "spin" has "probably entered the political vocabulary since the series,"[4]

[…]

> Adam Curtis, in his three-part TV documentary The Trap, criticised the series as "ideological propaganda for a political movement",[14] and claimed that Yes Minister is indicative of a larger movement of criticism of government and bureaucracy, centred upon public choice economics. Jay himself supported this:

>> The fallacy that public choice economics took on was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen; and this was reflected by showing that in any [episode] in the programme, in Yes Minister, we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest – that of the politicians and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers and improve their own lives. And that's why public choice economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.[15]

> Jay, however, has elsewhere emphasized that he and Lynn were interested first and foremost in the comical possibilities present in government and bureaucracy and that they were not seeking to promote any agenda: "Our only firm belief on the subject was that the underlying conflicts between ministers and ministries were better brought out into the open than kept secret".[16]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister#Politics


The two The Thick of It prequels?


The US system relies on them informing the public, or in case of say the ATF they make quasi law through opinions and then arrest the public and put them in tiny cages.

The public can decide to elect someone to shit can them. We have voted to liberate many of them from service. Obviously some wont like that, but they are servants to the people not peers.


Yeah, bureaucrat equals evil is an easy position to take:

No one likes following the rules until they are responsible for cleaning up after the people who didn’t follow the rules.


The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made. They've broken the rules, and it is time for the mess to be cleaned up and ejected from their jobs.

Many who have more HN-like peers and communities may not realize this is the opinion of the people, but the awakening is coming when the paychecks stop.


Funny, you could just replace “American” with “German” and the comment would still work, even like 90 years or so ago!


Yes differing opinion on bureaucracy means you are a Nazi! No matter what I'm looking for is closer to the size of US government pre WW1, not a massive army of servants literally gassing minorities.


> The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made.

Wait until you see the messes that are created when there are no rules because there is no bureaucracy.


Yeah, nothing says “order and rules” like revoking and then reinstating all federal grants over the course of what, a day or two? Less?

The order of things is that the GOP breaks everything, Democrats fix it all and get blamed for the painful process of fixing things and the sub optimality of the result, which the GOP has fought tooth and nail to remain sub-optimal because that helps their narrative and sub-optimal government enables them to win elections.

Then the GOP gets to run things again, breaks things senselessly, and we rinse and repeat.

Turns out electing people to government who think the government is the problem is a bad idea: they work to prove that their position is correct by actively breaking the government, thus can argue that they should remain in power because the government is “broken”.

“We are all trying to find the person who did this” meme. But with real human suffering.


> It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders

Whilst this is true, the civil service has been alleged to leak/ brief against such orders, not to mention be obstructive about their implementation.

The hard part for me at least is telling whether this is because eg "ordering us to make buildings out of compacted sand is hard" or "we are going to drag our feet as much as we can because this is dumb"


I think you mean civil servants. There should be nothing we all want more than to have a professional--and more importantly--apolitical civil service whose members are empowered to do their jobs.


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A coup by whom against whom ?


Well, a violent mob attacked the capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, egged on by the acting president who lost the election. It wasn't a coup, but in other countries we would call that an attempted coup.

That same politician instead of being barred from running for office again for inciting an attempted coup, was allowed to (by the justices who he had appointed to office, conveniently), and in is first act as president pardoned all those who participated in the attempted coup, sending a message that violent attempts to thwart the democratic process are ok so long as it's support of him.

So while not quite Liberia or Haiti level coup, certainly the most serious anti-democracy attempt in US history (makes Watergate look cute by comparison) and yet half the country just shrugged it off, opening the door to a fascist (self-serving politicians married with self-serving broligarchs) government.


I was referring to the 6th of January 2021 event where a large gathering of Trump followers stormed the capitol.

From my understanding that would be by Trump and his followers, against the rest of the United States population/democracy/whatever you prefer.


I'm noticing quite a few down votes on this. You should know I based this on Wikipedia, it's pretty much just facts. So if you find yourself reading this and not enjoying the facts, maybe you should reconsider your support for that orange clown.

Blows my mind that anyone would vote for him, any time I see a clip of him I can physically feel my IQ dropping. I can't imagine a more obvious moron, it's so clear from listening to him talk that he has no idea what he's talking about half the time and the other half he's lying.

It baffles me that anyone would vote for him.


Weather was fine tonight.

Also DCA is the most popular airport and congress would stage their own revolution if they had to go further.


I definitely think it’ll stay open for charter flights (part 135)


it’s actually really hard for private jets / charter (whether part 91 or part 135) to use dca. requirements include having an armed officer on board. as a result almost nobody flies charter into dca.


Yeah, it's at least partially Congress's fault DCA is as busy as it is. Every few years, they push to allow more flights, and longer flights, into the airport, because they all want to convenience.

Which is silly, it's not like IAD is all that far away. It's a straight shot down the Access Road to 66 and then into the city. Of course, with the RTO mandate, the portion from 66 inward is going to get busy again, but hey, Congress wanted that too, so reap what they sow, I suppose.


DCA is much nicer in pretty much all respects other than having a fairly restricted set of routes. When the routes are available, I’ll pick DCA every time. It’s a gem, and I’m glad that Congress’ selfishness overrode their terrorism paranoia on this one.


That's true, DCA is smaller footprint, so easier to navigate inside. And even better now that the remote terminal redone and linked properly (vs the old "Take a bus and wait on a bench").

But, the last few years, I haven't had any issues at IAD. Yeah, it takes longer to get from the front door to the gate, but that's about it. The security lines are more reasonable now (pre-COVID they were pretty long at times).

I pick IAD when I can, but that's only because I live in Reston. If I lived inside the Beltway, I'd pick DCA, but only because of the shorter drive, not the airport experience itself.

And I wouldn't want DCA to be shuttered. But, it's been at capacity for a while and Congress keeps pushing that limit.


    but I have a feeling that will be the end of 
    DCA's usefull life as a major passenger airport.
Wait, what?

I was with you until this last sentence. You think DCA will be spun down because an accident occurred there?

This seems wild - what am I missing here?


I only have a passing interest in this, but DCA's approach is tricky, the airspace is complex and restricted, and then you mix in military pilots doing VIP helicopter training runs across the approach. The procedures make it safe-ish, but it's riskier than other major airports.




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