‘Scared To Death’: Former FAA Employee Sounds Alarm On Mass Firings

A former employee of the Federal Aviation Administration issued a dire warning this week after he and hundreds of other probationary employees were fired amid mass federal government cuts under President Donald Trump.

“This is about protecting national security, and I’m scared to death,” said Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, who was part of the FAA’s National Airspace System Defense Program, in an interview with The Associated Press. “And the American public should be scared, too.”

Spitzer-Stadtlander — who says he was working on a program in Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles — told The AP that he imagined his job was safe because his branch was tied to national security threats.

The firings, first reported by CNN, arrive just weeks after a midair collision left 67 people dead in Washington, D.C.

Spitzer-Stadtlander told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday that the public “needs to be concerned” by the firings of public safety and national security professionals in the FAA and the Department of Transportation.

“By being summarily fired, without any warning, actually, while I was in the process of working, I think that that is detrimental to national security,” he said, adding that he was working “late into the night” contrary to the administration’s claims that federal workers are “leeches” on the government.

Spitzer-Stadtlander later hit back at a claim by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who wrote on X that no “professionals who perform safety-critical functions” were fired.

“From my perspective and the work I was doing, it is a flat-out false statement,” he said.

Another former FAA employee, who worked as an aviation safety assistant at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, told “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday that she figured her position wasn’t at risk, either.

A termination notice sent Friday blamed the firing on her job performance, a move that employment lawyer Michal Shinnar called a “purely false stated reason” as, by law, federal probationary employees can only be removed for reasons tied to performance or misconduct.

“We don’t let an agency get around these congressional directives by just terminating our probationary employees,” Shinnar told CBS, “and mass claiming it’s performance when it’s not.”