Can firing a bureaucrat in DC cause a plane to crash in Toronto? According to wild new theory being promulgated by progressives and the media, it certainly can.
In science, the Butterfly Effect describes how small changes in input can have large changes in output. As the classic thought experiment goes, a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan, generating tiny air currents with each beat, could dramatically change the weather in California, at least in principle. In practice, as with most of chaos theory, the inputs and outputs are incredibly hard to determine, separated by incredibly complex processes, and tangled up in such a way as to make them impossible to untangle. In the case of the butterfly, who’s to say where the wind from a flap of the wings ends when air molecules bounce around and mix with one another at incredible speed, over 1,100 miles per hour, anyway? To some extent, what scientists are saying is that the Earth’s atmosphere is intimately connected around the world, so attempting to say where one thing ends and another begins can be a fool’s errand. As weather is a product of the atmosphere and the atmosphere is everywhere, a butterfly’s wings can contribute to pushing an air molecule all the way around the world and on its way, it will collide with an uncountable number of other molecules, which in turn collide with others and so on and so forth, some of which might lead to a gale force wind. The government, of course, is not the weather, far from it, and yet we see Democrats and their progressive allies embracing a similar idea for the function of government employees: The layoff or firing of an employee in a department not necessarily related to the functioning of the department or the outcome the department is supposed to achieve, is somehow supposed to ripple through the entire government, causing “chaos and confusion” as PBS, a government funded outfit, ironically, recently described it. While the idea that all government spending is good and every government employee is indispensable has been an unstated pillar of progressive philosophy for the past few decades, the most modern incarnation as an actual theory of government workers can be dated to President Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, like so many other things. In fact, this grand new principle was proposed nine days later, following a tragic accident at the Ronald Reagan International Airport, when a passenger plane coming in for landing collided with a Blackhawk military chopper. Though not exactly Trump-friendly media outlets like Al Jazeera were observant enough to report, “Even as emergency responders were working to recover the remains of passengers and crew members who died in the January 29 midair collision near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, social media users, especially critics of President Donald Trump, pointed to some of Trump’s policies as contributors to the crash.” They proceeded to cite posts on X including, “Just last week, Trump FIRED the heads of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard, and disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee,” and “On your 2ND DAY, you 1. Fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, 2. Fired the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee, 3. Froze hiring of all Air Traffic Controllers, 4. Fired 100 top FAA security officers.”
Whether or not any of these individuals had an active role, much less responsibility, for safely landing planes was irrelevant, as was whether the experts of the real card carrying kind progressives are so fond of citing when it suits them agreed that was actually the cause of the crash. “All the processes to control and deconflict air traffic in the DC area have been well established for a long time,” explained Jim Cardoso, a former US Air Force colonel and pilot who is now senior director of the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute. “The personnel involved in the accident – air crew from the two aircraft and the (air traffic controllers) in place at the time of the accident – would similarly not have been affected by” the recent policy changes since President Trump was sworn in. Two weeks later, however, Democrats and the mainstream media didn’t care much about the experts either when they adopted this approach following President Trump’s decision to fire several hundred more FAA employees. Instead, the Associated Press clearly linked the two directly in their headline, “Trump begins firings of FAA staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash” and continued to do so in the first paragraph. “The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport,” they began before revealing the details. First, the workers fired were probationary and presumably had yet to even take on their full responsibilities. Second, none have any role in air traffic control or safety – the closest they could come was “personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance.” Third, the FAA has 45,000 employees, meaning the cuts affected less than 1% of the agency’s staff. PBS followed suit regardless, offering almost exactly the same headline, though perhaps even more misleadingly, claiming that the firings were actually among air traffic control, as in “Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control employees weeks after fatal DC plane crash.” Nor was this the end of the insistence that firing unrelated employees caused crashes. Instead, the theory was promptly extended to crashes in other countries where the FAA has no authority or responsibility. Shortly after these articles were posted, a plane landed upside down in Canada at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Miraculously, everyone on board survived, but still President Trump’s less than one percent cut was almost immediately identified as the potential cause of the accident, even though the accident occurred outside of the country. Tom Costello, NBC News’ Senior Correspondent claimed, falsely “This is going to, once again, raise the concern about FAA staffing, air traffic control staffing.” CNN’s Dana Bash said something similar, insisting “This is happening against the backdrop of massive cuts across the federal government including at the FAA.”
Some have gone even further, blaming the President for all crashes on his watch, holding the President accountable as though he was in air traffic control himself or even piloting the plane. Once again on X, “Watch that video. Blame trump. This is like 5th plane incident-accident since Trump took office 1 month ago! Hes [sic] in charge of FAA per se. Never had this much crap under Biden and all other presidents- especially under in a short period of time,” “The Delta plane crash in Toronto is among more than a dozen plane incidents under Trump 2.0 over the last 3 weeks. Trump and Musk firing veteran government employees and conducting immigration raids will continue to make aviation super unsafe,” and “8 aviation crashes in 4 weeks of Trump. Trump’s Transportation Secretary is an MTV and Fox News host. Delta flight flipped over in Toronto. I can say for absolute certainty DEI and vaccines are not the cause, #PreidentMusk [sic] and King Trump firing 400 FAA staff was.” Even Democrat Congressman got in on the act, with Eric Swalwell posting about it multiple times, “Since 2009, how many American airliners crashed before Trump came into office? ZERO. When does Trump start taking responsibility for the next plane crash?” and “No president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,” which happened to be false, by the way. Of course, any actual casual connection, much less an explanation of how a less than one percent cut can reasonably be described as massive is left unsaid, but sadly that didn’t prevent the idea from spreading beyond the FAA and flight safety. NPR’s Will Stone and Pien Huang reported on cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health, claiming “Health agencies lose staff members in key areas as Trump firings set in.” As they described it, “Termination letters landed in the mailboxes of hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health over the weekend, as the Trump administration moved ahead with firings announced verbally Friday.” In case you missed the hint that the impacts of these firings would be cataclysmic, “Among staff who were caught up in the first wave of layoffs: Ph.D.-trained scientists tasked with helping local and state officials respond to outbreaks; employees who ensure that medical devices for patients with cancer and diabetes are safe; and a public health worker stationed at an international airport who enforces regulations to prevent animals carrying rabies and other infectious diseases from entering the U.S.”
Whether or not those jobs were actually being performed by these individuals, note the weasel word “tasked,” or could be better handled by someone else are obviously the most important questions, but they are not even asked, much less answered. Once again, the impression is of complete catastrophe until you get to the reality that the maximum percentage of the workforce affected will be one in ten, meaning the implicit belief is that an organization of 13,000 people simply cannot function at a slightly lower headcount and any reduction in headcount will ripple like the butterfly flapping its wings. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health is experiencing similar cuts and in both regards, Dr. Steve Monroe, a former senior CDC official, called the decision “extremely shortsighted,” because it swept up people “regardless of whether they were filling an important role in the organization or how well they were performing.” Perhaps needless to say, the Trump Administration disputes this, noting that once again these were probationary employees, claiming in the termination letter that the affected individuals were “not fit for continued employment because [their] ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs, and [their] performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the Agency.” In the handful of cases where an employee was terminated incorrectly, they were quickly called back as even NPR admits that “Officials were able to save some jobs because certain positions were deemed essential, such as people who work at the NIH’s clinical center, one person said.” Beyond the lack of evidence between the firings and any connection to an actual service rendered to the American people, two additional points jump out: How many people are these departments hiring when 10% of the workforce is new and on probation? Second, why should we forget that neither the CDC or the NIH exactly covered itself with glory when they were tested and desperately needed during the pandemic? Between promulgating fake science like social distancing and masking, failing to develop a test for coronavirus, using the American people as a grand experiment, colluding with the teacher’s unions to keep schools closed, and then lying about both the efficacy and the risks of the vaccine, why would any reasonable person not conclude that major changes are in order?
Regardless, NPR was not alone in their assessment of these firings. For its part, Politico characterized a similar staff reduction this way, “The Trump administration carried out more mass firings across the Health and Human Services Department this weekend, continuing a chaotic purge of the federal workforce that career officials and lawmakers warned would hurt key programs and impair efforts to track threats to public health. The cuts hit staffers at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, several people with knowledge of the firings told POLITICO. The administration also terminated some staff at the office responsible for emergency preparedness and response. The firings were part of a culling of roughly 3,600 probationary employees across the sprawling department that began earlier this week with terminations primarily at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.” The “cuts included officials working on Medicare and Medicaid initiatives aimed at improving care for beneficiaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and at the CMS office that oversees Obamacare, as well as officials at the FDA offices that regulate prescription drugs and medical devices. The layoffs at FDA included some staff who review medical device products, three of the people with knowledge of the firings said, raising fears they would slow the agency’s ability to evaluate and approve new devices.” In other words, none of the supposed calamities have actually happened. They might never happen. No one knows or seemingly cares whether these probationary employees were adding value to their agencies or why there are so many of them. No one questions why they were hired, or whether or not they are essential in light of their complete failure during the pandemic. Instead, we’re simply “raising fears” and the same public health experts who completely failed “warned it would damage the government’s frontline response to threats like bird flu.” “On day one, the new HHS secretary is gutting the agencies that would be necessary to make America healthy again,” claimed Reshma Ramachandran, a Yale health professor and chair of the FDA task force of the nonprofit Doctors for America, who I am willing to bet opposed the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services Secretary in the first place. Regardless, we are witnessing the birth of a grand new theory of government, one where cuts to the government in one country can result in crashes in another, and any and all cuts are calamitous beyond recognition. Edward Lorenz coined the term, the Butterfly Effect in the 1960s. I can only imagine what he would say if he knew it now applied to government workers.
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