Following the Reagan Plane Crash, Many Are Looking at Trump's Recent Firings

When President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he made it pretty clear that his administration's overriding goal was to transform the federal government. That meant firing a lot of established agency heads, some of which have not yet been replaced.

While these kinds of firings certainly signal change, they can also lead to instability and uncertainty. Given that, many want to know why he fired the head of the TSA, especially in light of the Washington, D.C. plane crash that happened just days later. Here's what we know.

The day after he took office, Trump fired the head of the Transportation Safety Administration as well as all the members of a key aviation security advisory group known as the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. The members of the committee received a memo on Jan. 21 saying that they had been dismissed because of the administration's “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security," per CBS News.

Trump also fired David Pekoske, the TSA administrator who was first appointed by Trump during his first term. No reason was offered for his departure, but it seems like these firings were done in an effort to bring the Department of Homeland Security more closely into Trump's orbit, and to ensure that its top priority was immigration.

There is no way to know whether these firings had anything to do with the Jan. 29 plane crash.

What seems clear, though, is that the Trump administration had deprioritized aviation safety almost as soon as they took office, sending a clear signal that they were focused instead on immigration.

Flight safety is the kind of government benefit that most people take for granted. It's a critical service that we rarely think about because planes rarely crash. When they do, though, it becomes clear just how important it is to have good people in place.

Although we cannot say whether Trump's firings of these key people resulted in the crash, Trump has made baseless assertion that the crash was actually the fault of the Biden administration and specifically of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Trump also seemed to suggest that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts were somehow responsible for the crash, but once again offered no evidence to support that assertion.

"Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch," Buttigieg wrote in response to Trump's remarks.

"President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe," he continued. "Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again."