SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired

wired.com

192 pointsactionfromafar133 comments

> Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities

This is misleading:

Schedule A(u) is for disabilities. Schedule A(r) is for short term appointments with a cap of a few years. I believe they are simply using short term positions.

https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/hiring-staying-or-changing-jobs...

I believe schedule A refers to a whole set of options to forgoe the standard job posting and interview process, where disability is only one such exemption.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...

Your link says that A(r) still requires posting the jobs officially, though. It certainly seems like they skipped that. Also, the director lied.

The article implies they lied about having disabilities which is not true.

This carries more weight than failure to post a job properly.

I'm saying that they may still have done exactly that. If they were using A(r), they would have posted the job.

The choices to accomplish this goal are

a) use a temporary employment justification

b) lie about having a disability

Why would they do b) when a) is true and carries no risk? You’re not being reasonable.

They either need to lie about posting the job officially or lie about having a disability. Why do you think one lie is more reasonable than the other?

In truth, I think getting an unscrupulous doctor to declare they all have ADHD or autism is probably their simplest option, if they’re at all trying to keep up appearances of doing things by the book (and they are, otherwise why bother with this Schedule A stuff at all?)

"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."

Musk also threatened litigation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/17/elon-musk-says-spacex-will-s...

Whitaker's replacement has promised to reexamine the SpaceX matter.

https://www.surfrider.org/news/surfrider-sues-faa-to-address...

Funny that people focus on the „Schedule a“ part, when the actual problem is the worst form of regulatory capture this seems to be by the looks: the regulated industry simply taking over the regulator.

Whoever wrote the schedule A line intended to mislead, rather than inform. So I can’t trust that the other material here isn’t misconstrued.

It is. The article full of innuendo seemingly linking personnel reductions at FAA with recent catastrophes. While they don't say it explicitly they write it so that the casual reader would conclude those ate related events. They also call the new employees "not fully vetted" while not specifying which vetting is needed and knowing they are seasoned competent professionals who held multiple positions of trust. Again, creating an impression of impropriety without any substance to back it up.

No conflict of interest here! Move along, folks.

I am all for removing the enormous overhead created at regulatory agencies all over the western world. i do not think that this is the way to do it. if trump was cutting jobs left and right or maybe even slash an agency, fine. but getting in a HNWI to rule over himself is the worst nightmare. this will not end well.

Careful, it may soon be illegal to say this.

> Trump's pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has vowed to "come after" the media

Yes, it is alarming. May even develop into FBI just forcing private companies to ban speech they don't like! Oh wait tgeycalready did: https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-colluded-twitter-suppress-free-...

For the record, the Twitter Files detail what Trump's Administration did as he's the president at the time.

He was the President, true, but claiming he was in control of the same FBI which actively tried to pin treason on him is going a bit too far I think...

Got to say, I expected Trump take 2 to be bad, but I am quite surprised at how _rapidly_ the US is moving towards the Russian mafia state model, and how quiet the legislature is being about it.

The legislature that spent the last 20 years not legislating and ousting anyone who tried legislating across the aisle with Democrats? They’re mostly feckless cowards serving now. I don’t think they would actually know how to write real legislation that benefited the people and not their lobbied interests.

It’s mostly because most Americans have very little clue of what the end state and the process to get there looks like. A lot of commonalities like borderline legal or gray area business practices are often extolled as virtues here or “clever business hacks”. It takes only a few to apply them in the direction that a lot of folks are simply unfamiliar with without having lived in the Soviet bloc.

They also think they can reverse it easily. "How bad could it be in 4 years?"

We have a 28 year blueprint of how bad it can get and it starts in 1997 Russia

One thing people don’t anticipate is that the government can step in and nationalize enterprises. US hasn’t done that in a while but I’d be watching for hostile political takeovers at some point in the future. Last time it happened was with General Motors in 2008 but it’s a tool that exists and can be used in a different direction.

I’d expect the _optimistic_ case is that the US is still cleaning up the mess in the late 30s.

The pessimistic case, of course, is that it is not recognised as a mess that needs cleaning up.

I wonder if the rates of firearm ownership in this country make it different than other countries that descend into madness.

I’d say that in the top 10 US is an outlier. Let’s hope we don’t regress to the mean

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian...

If it comes to that the US may actually fall apart, so I hope we won't find out.

Yes, even more people will get killed.

The legislature are the henchmen. Why would they be anything but quiet?

The 2016 legislature, esp Senate, was still mostly the "GOP old guard" and wouldn't have put up with this. But they're either gone, or "converted" to avoid Trump's direct retribution (now even more powerful as backed by Musk's reach and dollars), which is no joke.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101009

Must be an interesting topic!

When do we start the general strike?

Because that is what is going to take to stop this corruption, which otherwise will be endless.

With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.

The other issue with a general strike here is that the people backing this up have more money than $deity, and I'm sure that they realize that they have more than a single person could resonably spend in a lifetime. I think that would lead to an acceptable tradeoff of smaller "income" for more power.

I'm afraid a general strike would just be ignored.

Most people won't care until it starts to directly affect them. And I don't mean "this will make air travel less safe and you fly sometimes so this directly affects you," I mean direct, immediate consequences. 90 million eligible voters didn't bother to vote last time around. Another 77 million voted for this. That's two thirds of voters who either don't care or are in favor. And it's not like there was any mystery. Nothing that's happening now should be the least bit surprising.

Agreed. The scorpion didn't try to hide what it was, and the frog still gave it a ride.

Has the US ever done a general strike?

I don't know! We do, however, have a fun history of the oligarchs getting the governments help breaking the strikes, including using the national guard to gun down striking workers and their families.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

If Trump wants to use the military against illegal immigrants, you can be sure he'd have no qualms using it against illegal strikers.

> With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.

The price of eggs didn't go down, Trump hasn't done anything pro-economy, and hundreds of thousands of pointless layoffs are happening (DEI firings include conservative wifes, conservatives with disabilities, black conservatives, veterans, who could have known?).

Economic prospects are nose diving regardless, so there's no reason not to strike.

Many people have so many of their own problems, debt, whatever, that it takes a lot more than this to get them out of their homes and on the streets.

That is one thing Europeans do well which Americans do not.

Gov workers aren't allowed to strike, and if they did, Trump is the type of person who might just fire them all and leave the government for dead.

There are probably only a few groups who have real striking power and are difficult to replace. ATCs maybe the most. If they all walked out in protest, the government would be in a major pickle. But boy would they be targeted by the MAGA crowd. I can see Elon doxxing them and the striking ATCs getting death threats and worse.

I'm not sure why people think that would change anything. The people in charge are completely insulated to any repercussions and aren't accountable to anyone.

Any Republicans who turn against the regime will be ousted and replaced with bootlickers.

I don't think they would be insulated from a general strike.

How would it affect them? Any of Musks employees doing it would be fired immediately.

And then they'd need to find some scabs to do their job instead.

They have infinite money, so that's not really hard to do.

Money can't actually buy everything. Experience is hard to replace.

I think we're clearly seeing that money can, in fact, buy everything.

Worse than that, Republican elected officials are scared of violent retaliation by Trump's mob of goons for disloyalty.

Newer, different boot-lickers.

https://archive.ph/sVJ7m

Trump launched his shitcoin 1 month ago, and it's already a distant memory.

His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country. The rest of what he and Musk are doing is real, lasting damage that will take a long time to recover from.

> His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country.

How do you figure? It used to be the President couldn't leverage his office to make money. Now he has multiple legal vectors to solicit a bribe. I say that damages the country greatly. And the fact that the president is literally launching scams -- what message does that say to other scammers?

I was thinking benign in comparison with all the other shit going on. But yes it certainly does enable/encourage the scammers (not that they needed encouragement). It mostly just affects Trump’s base which will get shafted and maybe serve to wake some of them up to the fact that they’re being scammed and then maybe things will change in the next election. When you hit people’s pocket books they forget about everything else.

That coin is not even in the top 10 of the worst things he did recently. My personal "worst of" is (in no particular order):

- siding with Putin and scolding Ukraine for being attacked by Russia (although this follows a tried-and-tested pattern: according to the Nazis, the Poles were also to blame for being invaded in 1939)

- interfering with European politics to support populist/far-right parties like the Reform UK or AfD (who also side with Putin - starting to see a common thread here...)

- and of course the dismantling of USAID, because money spent on helping other countries (especially poor shithole countries and countries who have the nerve to disagree with you) is wasted, right? Why not put it into the woodchipper and spend the money on tax cuts for the rich instead?

One assumes that Putin has gotten the ol' piss tape out of storage.

It makes no sense. Who cares about the supposed 'pee tape' at this point? If such a thing were released, it would only excite the Trump base more. Ordering sex workers to urinate on a bed that Obama slept in? I wouldn't put it past Trump and Musk to conjure something like that up on purpose.

Clearly Putin has something on Trump, but what could that possibly be? He owns most of the system and controls the rest.

Ah, but the tape, if it exists, might confirm Stormy Daniels' testimony about his naughty bits. He seems like exactly the sort of insecure weirdo for whom that would be a really, really big deal; remember the whole hand size thing?

He cares. Do his fans?

Probably not. But what’s that got to do with anything? Like, if you’re expecting Trump to be _rational_ rather than emotional… Have you been living on the moon for the last eight years?

> Clearly Putin has something on Trump

Why does it have to be that Putin is holding something over Trump to force this behavior? Occam's razor would say Trump just agrees with Putin and wants to form an alliance with him. They're natural allies because they have a similar worldview.

There’s ’similar worldview’, and then there’s parroting Russian propaganda to the extent that even a few of the generally snivelingly loyal Republican legislators appear to be raising eyebrows. Like, it’s weird behaviour.

> Clearly Putin has something on Trump, but what could that possibly be?

Maybe something Epstein related. Even Trump's base has people who want to shoot pedophiles.

They all went silent when all those trump+ivanka+epstein photos came out. I haven't seen a peep in weeks and it used to be constant drum beating.

It was never very real anyway since they have no problem with people like Matt Gaetz or organizations like the Catholic Church.

My worry is you've got it slightly wrong and trumps base actually has people who just want to shoot _SOMEONE_ and the brief pedo obsession was just a way to label who is ok to hurt that day. Trump is great for them since he constantly says intentionally othering things like "genetics make better people"/"his supporters have better genes" and "all immigrants are criminals sent here by other countries" and "your immigrant neighbors are eating your pets" and "trans men athletes just want to hurt women in sports".

It literally doesn't matter - people brought guns to protests and even broke in and stormed the capitol trying to get to the senators. I don't think any of them are anywhere close to holding trump accountable for anything, including paving the way for Putin.

"Firehose of bullshit" at an unprecedented scale, that's what this is.

It's an intentional strategy. It's a more intense form of the classic Gish galloping technique to just spam the zone with so many actions it's impossible to meaningfully talk about all of them.

Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.

This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.

Musk is hiring employees from his own company SpaceX, using a backdoor to avoid vetting, to an agency that regulates his own company, to change critical safety systems. After the secretary of that department outright lied about what's happening.

Meanwhile contracts continue to be awarded to SpaceX with no attempt from Musk to recuse himself or separate the conflict of interest.

> 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).

> Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.

Depth of reporting is not accuracy, and there may be a bit of illusion here.

For instance, the bit you cite (their reporting on Schedule A) is a great example of lazy reporting for a cheap "gotcha" to amplify ragebait with misinformation -- the Wired reporters either couldn't be bothered to look up the various forms of Schedule A hiring (in this case, Schedule A (r) [0] vs. Schedule A (u) [1]), or they are intentionally mis-reporting in order to add more outrage. Only section U deals with disabilities -- section R deals with temporary hiring.

I think you and I are walking away with very different impressions of the quality of Wired's "depth of coverage".

[0]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/part-213/subject-group-...

[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/part-213/subject-group-...

Is the idea that software experience has been holding the FAA back?

The vague applicable part of the r is this:

professional/industry exchange programs that provide for a cross-fertilization between the agency and the private sector to foster mutual understanding, an exchange of ideas, or to bring experienced practitioners to the agency;

Amazing that rocket application guys are the most valuable experts when dealing with air traffic control.

> This is outright corruption

Mars, baby. You ain't seen nothin yet.

I noted downvotes of displeasure. Rebuttal would be more informative. Focus on "cost savings" and doing away with "corruption". Bonus points for connecting dot$ between El Doge's various businesses and the MIC.

> special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities

Just to add to the irony, that type of authority is exactly the type of "DEI" practice that Elon/Trump is railing against as "corrupt/Marxist".

Piling on corruption under the guise of rooting out corruption. It's an old trick used by dictators in other countries.

It is 100% Orwellian doublespeak. It should be a five alarm fire, but cowed media outlets are incapable of calling it out for some reason. Probably because they are terrified of the consequences. Preemptive surrender. Dark times ahead.

The outcome of "calling it out" for 8 years straight is a comeback with popular vote win. So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably for so long.

Indeed. The problem is that the voting base has been carefully groomed for many years to distrust independent journalism, and "calling out" anything is just perceived as partisan and not to be trusted.

>So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably

I'm not sure how a strategy of "ignore it and don't mention it" is going to perform better than "call it out"...

A working theory would be that people do not believe that there can be bad consequences until they get burned more, so things will need to get worse for a specific set of people. It's the strategy of falling to the bottom of the pool so you can push on the floor to kick yourself back up. But if you've got other ideas go for it.

The only strategy that works apparently is to let them screw up the country so badly people believe it.

I wonder what will happen then. In Russia it doesn't matter what anyone believes. But maybe the US population is different?

America has a long history of not holding its political leaders accountable when they screw up massively. Gaslighting, obstruction, projection are pretty powerful tools.

That's not how I would describe the overall behavior of the media for the last 8 years.

Though obviously a large amount of people don't believe anything except what they want to hear.

I have no idea what you're saying here. For years I've been seeing people posting links to articles with either the headline or some paragraph marked up to spell out what it's trying to say. Articles using passive voice and avoiding the conclusion were common for a very long time now - as much as I appreciate listing facts rather than freaking out about results in articles, often they just fail to call a spade a spade.

From the transparency of the comments, it's clear many people are in denial about this. The media enjoy the circus, even if it's on fire.

Like they care at all about using anything else that gives them more power and control. They will use all the freedom created by the previous generations of Americans to reduce as much freedom for others as they can. Fascists do fascists things.

> This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.

It was better when folks in the FAA tried to hide their conflicts of interest!

Unironically yes. The need to hide them makes it more difficult to have them.

Under Biden, the FAA was slow walking SpaceX approvals. Now the political wind has reversed, Musk is stretching the limit on what he can get the FAA to do. If the worst that happens is SpaceX gets to crash its rockets faster then no worries. FAA and aviation in general may or may not benefit from any reform due to Musk, but the worst thing is the indication of how Musk is operating in all other areas of government - underhanded techniques to push an agenda to the limit.

> Under Biden, the FAA was slow walking SpaceX approvals.

Source?

Lacking a whistleblower this kind of thing is impossible to prove, but is obvious from the public conflict.

> obvious

So just relaying your feelings on the subject, rather than adding any facts to the conversation. cool cool cool…

The main point I made was how it indicates what Musk is doing and how he is doing it so you are nitpicking an irrelevance...

You are claiming your main point is obvious with nothing to back that up, but sure you can hand-wave that away as irrelevant.

No the slow walking of SpaceX approvals is obvious in my opinion. You seem to be an expert at misconstruing what people say.

What did I misconstrue? You put forth your opinion as fact, I asked you to back that opinion up with some facts but it seems you are unable to do that. Seems pretty straight forward to me, but accusing others of misconstruing your argument is quite the defection technique. Feel free to present your opinions, just frame them as such so others know they are just your feelings and not real.

It really bothers me that there are a bunch of goons who flag every single story about the stuff Trump and Musk are up to. Really makes you realize that a solid chunk of HN or even HN itself aren't on the up and up.

It’s the year 2032, free speech is now only allowed on Twitter. Any speech criticizing Trump is automatically flagged and your personal details used to automatically fire you from your job, executed by the new “efficiency heads” installed into each board of private companies. People are always fired for “efficiency and performance” reasons. The people feel the cold grip around their neck removing their ability to scream. Most people have fallen in line, out of fear of being labeled a terrorist and getting your life ruined.

As I write this with a humorous cautionary intention, I’ve made myself worried by how plausible this scenario sounds.

> Any speech criticizing Trump

You mean any wrong thoughts detected by the DOGE-issued mandatory Neuralink.

Be aware that a large number of comments on these articles are also flagged and not visible.

You can turn on showdead in your profile if you’d like to see them.

Thanks. That is actually very helpful.

EDIT: I am aware of content that was removed from this page, but I cannot see it with this setting.

You can email hn@ycombinator.com if you have a specific issue. Generally speaking though user moderation doesn’t delete comments it marks them dead, which showdead reveals.

There are definitely some comments from this thread that were permadeleted or otherwise squashed beyond the "show dead" level.

Yeah, pretty shocking. Not sure what intellectual gymnastics you have to do to defend Trump/Musk's actions -- either you've drunk the Kool Aid, are cashing in on the scam, or don't care as you already have yours.

Having said that, one group that are happy with Trump are the crypto bros, because the SEC just dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase as a result of their support for Trump's re-election.

> bunch of goons .. aren't on the up and up

What a horrible thing to say. I can't speak for "goons" other than myself, but I have no hidden agenda when I flag the multitude of one-sided propaganda stories flooding HN about how horrible President Trump and DOGE are.

I find the resulting discussions to be hyperbolic, FUD-invoking, divisive and one-sided - as evidenced by your insults to half of U.S. voters - offering little to no discourse of value.

I thought you guys were for free speech

Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.

Considering that the most upvoted and active posts are related to DOGE, it appears that your interests are not aligned with the interests of many others on the site.

I don't want to hear about Trump all day either. I'd rather just hear about tech and science. But what's happening is having a huge impact on tech and science. If it weren't for Musk and DOGE these posts wouldn't even be here, so you can blame them.

> it appears that your interests are not aligned with the interests of many others on the site.

You cannot see all the comments left here. So you don’t know what’s being said, as a whole.

Everyone is concerned about quality, but I don’t think what you’re describing is characteristic of a curious community.

I’d say it is show a curious community about trying to understand what the heck is going on and what are the implications of what is happening.

There’s a bit of flame-throwing but nothing like Reddit and plenty of information in the comments.

> Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.

The fact that you are reading and posting in this thread suggests otherwise, my friend. If you truly had no interest, you wouldn’t read or post in threads about Musk and Trump.

You realize that you're pushing a narrative just as much? Sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la" isn't the "neutral position".

I do not claim to have a neutral position, I vote in every election, especially on the local level, where I actually express my non-neutral position.

It is also essentially impossible not to hear about the major things happening in the country, so staying informed is not much of an issue these days.

On the other hand driving yourself mad by doomscrolling and liking dozens and dozens of random posts about some random crap someone did that day does no good for anybody.

You're saying opinions like they are facts. Here are some of my opinions that differ.

I like getting a spread of news here. It is not an inevitability that I get it all in the same way from other places. I like an angle of logic over partisan screaming or head in the sand so I especially like people who tend toward logical arguments discussing things where I'm reading them.

I don't consider any of this "driving myself mad" or "doomscrolling" nor do I think blatant, egregious lies and corruption are "random people doing random things" and finally I think it DOES do good to know about and see (some of the) discussion about it.

I think there is a very real problem in willful ignorance of or ambivalence to corruption. I dont love when people try to tell me not to see or acknowledge or discuss things.

I see you’re in the ignorance is bliss camp. Indeed, lying to oneself is a time tested coping mechanism. Good luck with that!

But...but daddy Trump says Elon can totally be trusted to remove himself from any conflicts of interest!

>When questioned about potential conflicts between Musk’s private business interests and his government work, Trump said: "He won’t be involved."

>Musk echoed the sentiment, saying “I’ll recuse myself."

>Trump added that “if there's a conflict, he won't be involved. I mean, I wouldn't want that, and he won't want it."

Someone noted that determining if something is a conflict of interest for you is in itself a conflict of interest.

Yes, exactly. By definition, you cannot police your own conflicts of interest.

They've certainly recused themselves from a conflict of intelligence and/or common decency.

The flagging gets out of control on HN these days.

@dang can we start flagging some flagging ?

The flags are a function of the repetition. We turn off flags sometimes but we can't do it too much or the frontpage would be only about this.

I've been posting a lot about this—ironically I suppose, since the moderation comments are even more repetitive. Here are some recent posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you (or anyone) will take a look at those, then if you still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know and I'll take a crack at it.

Make flagger usernames public.

Vouching should be something for flagged as well

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