SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired

Engineers who work for Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been brought on as senior advisers to the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), sources tell WIRED.

On Sunday, Sean Duffy, secretary of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, announced in a post on X that SpaceX engineers would be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to take what he positioned as a tour. “The safety of air travel is a nonpartisan matter,” Musk replied. “SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”

By the time these posts were made, though, according to sources who were granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, SpaceX engineers were already being onboarded at the agency under Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities without requiring them to compete for the job,” according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

These new hires come after the terminations of hundreds of FAA probationary employees, and the most deadly month of US aviation disasters in more than a decade.

According to a source with knowledge of the situation, none of the SpaceX engineers were fully vetted by their start date. Unlike the very young technologists associated with Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who have been given access to critical systems at agencies ranging from OPM and the Treasury Department to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in recent weeks, though, the engineers identified by WIRED—Ted Malaska, Thomas Kiernan, Sam Smeal, and Brady Glantz—do appear to have experience relevant to the FAA.

Malaska is currently, according to his LinkedIn profile, a senior director of application software at SpaceX, where he started working in May 2021. Formerly the senior director of data engineering at Capitol One and a senior architect at FINRA, he graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2000 and cowrote a 2015 book on Hadoop application architectures.

Kiernan is currently a lead software engineer at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn page. Before joining SpaceX in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair and is a 2017 Dartmouth graduate.

Smeal is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since September 2021, according to his LinkedIn. He graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2018.

Glantz is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since May 2024 and worked as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.

Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FAA also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In his post on X, Duffy wrote, "Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.”

But on Wednesday, FAA acting administrator Chris Rocheleau wrote in an email to FAA staff, viewed by WIRED, that DOGE and the teams of special government employees deployed in federal agencies were “top-of-mind,” before noting that the agency had "recently welcomed” a team of special government employees who had already toured some FAA facilities. “We are asking for their help to engineer solutions while we keep the airspace open and safe,” he wrote, adding that the new employees had already visited the FAA Command Center and Potomac TRACON, a facility that controls the airspace around and provides air traffic control services to airports in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas.

In a Department of Transportation all-hands meeting late last week, Duffy responded to a question about DOGE's role in national airspace matters, and without explicitly mentioning the new employees, suggested help was needed on reforming Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) alerts, a critical system that distributes real-time data and warnings to pilots but which has had significant outages, one as recently as this month. “If I can get ideas from really smart engineers on how we can fix it, I’m going to take those ideas,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by WIRED. “Great engineers” might also work on airspace issues, he said.

SpaceX functioned as the pre-inauguration staging ground for the DOGE team, according to reporting from The New York Times and sources who spoke to WIRED. In the months between November 5 and January 20, members of DOGE including Steve Davis (president of Musk’s Boring Company) and the young engineer Luke Farritor were operating out of the company’s DC office, according to a source with knowledge.

The company did not respond to questions about whether these employees will retain their salaries and positions at the company during their time with DOGE. Many of the so-called department’s operatives have joined as “special government employees,” who are limited to working 130 days in a year. Last week WIRED reported that Tom Krause, a DOGE operative at the Treasury Department, would continue to maintain his position as CEO of the Cloud Software Group while also performing the duties of fiscal assistant secretary. Other members of Musk’s companies, including xAI and Tesla, have also taken on positions with DOGE.

Late last week, the Trump administration laid off 400 FAA workers, according to their union, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The union says these included probationary employees who worked on air traffic control communications and related radio and computer systems. Air traffic controllers were not affected by the layoffs, Duffy said in an X post.

Just two weeks before that, the US suffered its most deadly aviation incident in more than a decade, when 67 people died after an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet in Washington, DC. Though initial findings suggest complex equipment and communications issues possibly played roles in the disaster, President Trump was quick to blame “DEI,” railing against a decade-old program that helps the FAA identify talent among populations with disabilities. People with disabilities hired into the FAA and other federal agencies are often accepted under the Schedule A authority—exactly the route these new engineers have taken into the agency.

The FAA has frequently tangled with Musk’s SpaceX, as the rocket company and others fight to operate their own interests in crowded American airspace. In January, the FAA temporarily grounded SpaceX’s program after one of its Starship rockets broke apart midflight, reportedly damaging public property on Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. The FAA diverted dozens of commercial airline flights following the explosion and announced an investigation into the incident, which is ongoing and being led by SpaceX. Musk, however, characterized the failure as “barely a bump in the road” and did not seem to indicate that the investigation would slow SpaceX’s launch cadence. Last year, the company indicated it was aiming for 25 launches of the Starship in 2025.

FAA spokesperson Steven Kulm told WIRED that “the FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led mishap investigation.” The FAA did not respond to further questions about whether the presence of SpaceX engineers at the agency would constitute a conflict of interest.

In September, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines following two 2023 incidents in which SpaceX allegedly did not follow its license requirements, violating regulations. Responding to an X user posting about the penalties, Musk wrote, “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Shortly afterward, Musk called for FAA head Mike Whitaker to resign.

In January, more than three years before his term was due to end, Whitaker did resign.

“I told Elon, any conflicts, you can’t have anything to do with that,” said President Trump in a press conference this week, in response to a question about Musk, SpaceX, the FAA, and conflicts of interest. “So anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that.”