What I find amazing is that the Trump adminstration doesn't think that their lies won't be found out.
What did Trump do with all of the funds?
The Fulcrum reported that DOGE...
In February 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) laid off approximately 400 employees as part of federal workforce reductions initiated by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). These layoffs primarily targeted probationary employees—those with less than one year of service—and included roles such as maintenance mechanics, aeronautical information specialists, aviation safety assistants, and administrative staff. Although the Department of Transportation stated that no air traffic controllers or critical safety personnel were affected, unions and aviation experts expressed concern that the terminations impacted essential support roles necessary for maintaining aviation safety.
Hmm... "Curiouser and curiouser!"
The people they laid off were the ones who knew the systems and had worked on them for years, if not decades—they axed the institutional memory of the FAA.
And now, true to form, the Trump administration is playing the "Blame Game"!But we know the real reason: Trump and Musk.
They brought in a bunch of twenty-something whiz kids who knew nothing about the FAA and chopped off its head, the people with the tribal knowledge.
And it is only going to get worse. The deeper they get into updating legacy systems, the more they are going to run into cascading legacy problems.
My background is in nuclear power; I ran a test department where we handled systems integration for legacy systems. What I see here is what we used to call PhDs, Piled Higher and Deeper. So when I see that they want "Cloud Computing Infrastructure ($2.0 Billion)," what the engineer in me sees is a single point of failure, which is a GIANT no-no. What these twenty-something whiz kids see is AI running the whole FAA. What I see is a single-point failure waiting to happen!
In nuclear power, we had something called a Digital Plant Protection System (or in engineering jargon, a DPPS). It consisted of four computers running in parallel: if two out of the four detected a problem, the system shut the plant down. Why four when you only need two for a shutdown? Because you could take one offline to work on it while the remaining three still maintained 2-out-of-3 safety logic. That system ran on deterministic, fixed logic, not the fuzzy logic of an AI.
We also performed what is called Verification and Validation (V&V), where we actively tried to break the system before it ever went live. Will they be doing that on a cloud-based AI air traffic control system? I doubt it!
To me, a distributed system is much safer than one massive, AI-driven, cloud-based system where a single point of failure can take down the entire national air safety network!
The problem is that Musk & the Wiz Kids are corporate people and consumer tech, the mantra is "move fast, cut overhead, and fix bugs in production." But when that mindset gets imported into critical national infrastructure—whether it's the power grid, nuclear plants, or the FAA, it doesn’t work.
Safety-critical engineering is built on the exact opposite philosophy: defensive pessimism. You assume components will fail, timing signals will drift, and contractors will make mistakes, so you build physical redundancy, edge isolation, deterministic logic, and exhaustive V&V guardrails to contain the blast radius. When non-engineers look at those guardrails, they see "waste" and "slow bureaucracy," right up until the moment a single router takes down 17 regional air traffic control centers.
That is known as a single point of failure—something designs like the DPPS were built to eliminate, rather than invite.
Finally, Trump's $50 billion proposal, what is it for! What does he need it for on top of the $25 billion? Is he going to siphon it off for his pet project?
Then in September the GAO issued a critical report of the FAA... the GAO acknowledged that the FAA has begun accelerating its multi-billion-dollar effort to replace aging infrastructure, it warned that major gaps in planning, cost estimation, and cybersecurity put the agency at risk of further delays, safety incidents, and prolonged reliance on failing legacy systems. But it just went in one ear and out the other!
No... this is all wrong. People can die!
The same thing is happening in Social Security... "The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security"
Reporting Highlights:
- Missed Opportunity: Some Social Security officials said they welcomed DOGE — the agency needs a technological overhaul — only to see DOGE ignore them and prioritize quick (often empty) wins.
- Internal Revolt: Leland Dudek, the agency’s then acting chief, helped DOGE at first, then tried to resist when he saw what it was doing, Dudek said in 15 hours of candid interviews.
- DOGE Lives On: Multiple former DOGErs have taken permanent roles at the Social Security Administration, and Senate-confirmed Commissioner Frank Bisignano has embraced its approach.
Be prepared for major problems with Social Security!
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