The Briefing with Jen Psaki
Misfires: Arbitrary Firings Jeopardize Nukes and Airlines
Tue, 18 Feb 2025
Jen Psaki sounds the alarm on Donald Trump and Elon Musk's latest round of firings that put the safety of everything from air travel to our nuclear warheads at risk. She is joined by David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists Union, to discuss Trump and Musk's firing of FAA workers amid internal turmoil and growing concerns about flight safety. Next, Jen is joined by Norm Eisen, lawyer and co-founder of The Contrarian, to discuss the concerning implications of Musk's latest attempts to access sensitive information at the IRS and the Social Security Administration. Then, Jen is joined by DNC Vice Chair David Hogg and Faiz Shakir, More Perfect Union executive director, to discuss protests across the country against Trump and Musk, and how that energy can be translated into real change. Later, Jen outlines a historical parallel to the mounting pressure New York Governor Kathy Hochul is facing to remove NYC Mayor Eric Adams from office. She is joined by New York Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado to discuss his view on whether Hochul should remove Adams and what that process might look like. Finally, Jen shares another moment from her recent conversation with Rahm Emanuel who had an interesting take on the kind of candidates Democrats should be fielding - as part of her new podcast "The Blueprint with Jen Psaki".Check out our social pages below:https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsakihttps://www.instagram.com/InsideWithPsaki/https://www.tiktok.com/@insidewithpsakihttps://www.msnbc.com/jen-psakihttps://bsky.app/profile/insidewithpsaki.msnbc.com
Chapter 1: What alarming actions are being taken by Trump and Musk?
Well, everyone, you won't be surprised to hear, because you may be among them, it turns out the American people don't love watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk take an absolute wrecking ball to the federal government. I mean, today we saw massive protests right here in Washington, D.C., and also all across the country. You can see some of the photos on our screen.
Chapter 2: How are recent protests connected to safety concerns?
We saw protests in big cities and small towns and at state capitals. We saw just how pissed off people are about what's happening right now. And who could blame them? I mean, we just learned that Elon Musk's Doge crew is trying to get access to personal taxpayer data at the IRS. So basically, the world's richest man and his band of 20-something cronies want access to your personal data.
They want access to your tax returns, your addresses, your employment information, your banking details, and your Social Security numbers. I mean, this is the kind of issue that hits home for all of us. I'm sure it hits home for you because most of us pay taxes, right? Just like most of us fly in on airplanes. And today, unbelievably, there was another major commercial airline incident.
A Delta plane that took off from Minneapolis flipped over when it was attempting to land in Toronto. Nobody was killed, but at least 17 people were injured. And, of course, it's just the latest in a series of air incidents since Trump was sworn in and since an Army helicopter and an American Airlines plane collided right here in Washington, killing 67 people.
Well, today, just 19 days after that tragedy, we are also getting new details about the Trump administration's purge of hundreds of critical air safety workers at the FAA. And I'm going to go into more detail also with somebody who knows a lot about it in just a moment. But the larger point is this.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are screwing around with government in all sorts of ways, in ways that impact you personally, and in ways that impact our national security and our safety more broadly. And in that process, they are teaching us a whole lot about all of the ways that government actually keeps us safe. For example, I mean, when the U.S.
military needs to deploy more nuclear warheads on its planes and submarines to defend us, do you know who actually holds the components for those weapons? Who puts them together, makes sure they're safe, and delivers them to the Pentagon? Well, most of that work is actually done by the same people who also refurbish old nuclear weapons and dismantle the retired ones.
And it all happens at one plant on the Sandy Plains outside of Amarillo, Texas, called the Pantex plant. It's where the employees and contractors for the Department of Energy are constantly inspecting and outfitting America's nuclear weapons with high explosives, as well as their cores of highly radioactive uranium and plutonium.
All of this highly secretive, highly dangerous work is run by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. They oversee the US nuclear stockpile and its components, not just at Pantex, but at an entire network of plants, labs, and bases across the country.
The NNSA does all of that and transports nuclear material on US highways using a highly trained and heavily armed fleet of trucks and vehicles. And this is all overseen by career staff with very, very specific expertise, for some of them, decades of it. It's also the sort of government function that we don't think about all the time. I hope you don't think about all the time.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Musk's access to taxpayer data?
Well, our employees that we represent have to sign financial disclosure agreements to make sure they don't have any conflicts. Our aviation safety inspectors have to make sure that the carriers that they're overseeing they don't have a conflict with them.
They can't, if there's a shutdown, hopefully there isn't, but if there's a shutdown, they can't go and take a job working in the aviation industry that they oversee because that's a conflict of interest. So you have to, I think, you know, what's good for the cruise is good for the gander.
I'm so grateful you came in and talked to us. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. And coming up, Elon Musk and his Doge crew are headed to the IRS. And just in the last hour, we learned they're now inside the Social Security Administration, too. Former Obama ethics are friend of the show. Norm Eisen is standing by and he joins me in just 60 seconds.
OK, so I just mentioned this earlier, but I do want to take a deeper look at the latest frontier in Elon Musk's quest to infiltrate the government's most sensitive systems, because this time it's one that could affect every single one of you watching at home.
I mean, late yesterday, we learned that a member of Musk's team is seeking access to something called the Integrated Data Retrieval System at the IRS.
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Chapter 4: Why is the FAA facing mass layoffs and what does it mean for air travel?
Chapter 5: How is the safety of nuclear weapons being jeopardized?
I mentioned this, and I know you've probably been answering this question from friends and family as well. And people are understandably a little freaked out right now about air travel. And we're simultaneously seeing all of these layoffs, these firings that are happening under Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as what feels like an increase in incidents in the air. I just...
I wonder how you make sense of what's happening, that all happening simultaneously.
Well, thank you for having me on. It's been a difficult few weeks, obviously, and our hearts go out to the passengers on a plane today, the crew, the first responders. Happily, at the moment, there's been no fatalities. So hopefully that stays the way it is. I think that it's important to note that the U.S. air traffic control system is safe. And our members are a key reason why that's the case.
We work with integrity. We work with skill. And we have a deep background in how to maintain the air traffic control system and how to oversee it. But as you pointed out, just this past Friday, about 300 folks, 400 people got the ax on St. Valentine's Day, right? Out to dinner and enjoying a nice evening and find out they lost their job. We didn't get any notice from the FAA.
At this point right now, we don't know if it's 300, 400, or 1,000. Sorry, I just want to pause on that. It could be way more than the 350 that have been reported. It could be. They haven't told us who it is. As far as we're concerned, the inspectors and the technicians, they could...
We have probationary inspectors and technicians that could possibly have gotten the ax, but we don't know that for certain. All we're getting right now is our members reaching out to us and telling us, hey, I lost my job. And we're talking about people that support the entire air traffic control system by virtue of the support work that they do.
So let me start out and talk about aeronautical information specialists. They are a skilled group of people that create charts, navigational processes, a performance-based navigation where aircraft can fly in a lot more efficiently. It takes a long time to develop those skills. There's at least 30 of them that are probationary employees in the FAA that we represent.
And quite honestly, if they're gone, who's going to create that product? And the work that our aviation safety assistants do for our inspectors to make sure that they can actually go out and ramp airplanes and check on pilots and airworthiness of aircraft. They do all of that stuff because they have these support groups behind them.
You mentioned some of the skills, and maybe those are the main ones for people to understand. But for people who are watching who aren't experts, for all of these layoffs, and it was already understaffed to begin with, what is the impact on airports and the ability to safely land planes? How should people understand that if these cuts continue?
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Chapter 6: What legal actions are being taken against Musk's government access?
And today, on President's Day, thousands of Americans, you can see some video there, took to the streets in response. Americans marched all across the country from deep blue cities like New York and D.C. to solidly red states like Florida and Texas in what one grassroots organization dubbed No Kings on President's Day.
These protesters, some of whom marched in below freezing temperatures, felt the urgent need to speak out against this administration's anti-democratic policies and against this unprecedented power grab from Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It's a good sign. David Hogg is the vice chair of the DNC and the co-founder of March for Our Lives.
Faz Shakir is a senior advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and the executive director of More Perfect Union. They both join me now. It's great to see you both. And I wanted to talk to you because I think it's so important for people to hear what is happening with Democrats and all of the movements that are happening. Let me start just with the protests today.
David, you've been a part of movement politics before, so have you. Peaceful protests are certainly a good start. It doesn't totally change things. What's next? What do people who want to be active engage, what do they do next?
Well, for me, what I'm thinking about are all the young people that originally mobilized with us at the first March for Our Lives after the shooting in Parkland. Our country was in a very similar moment at that time, where we Republicans had the House, the Senate, and the presidency. We were told repeatedly that we wouldn't be able to create change.
And a lot of those young people have now graduated college. A lot of them are, even if they didn't go to college, are now old enough to run for office. And I think what we need to do is help bring those young people into office now to be the change that we've wanted for so long, but have failed to create.
So for me, that's what I think that next step is, is to support those young leaders and bring in that new generation.
You were just talking about how Senator Sanders is going to be out there. Others will be out there exciting people. One of the things that I think you're particularly good at is speaking in English about the challenges people are facing out there. How should people be doing that about the threats that Elon Musk and Donald Trump pose?
There's obviously every day there's trying to confuse you, draw chaos, put you in a whirlwind that you feel like, I don't even know what the hell is going on. And, you know, if you focus in, I do think there's an opportunity to show resistance in a meaningful and impactful way.
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Chapter 7: How are activists responding to Trump's and Musk's actions?
It's not legal what he's trying to do. Is there anything the state's prepared to do to block that?
Well, I want to be clear. The laws on our books allow for cooperation where there's been a conviction. Right. And I think sometimes when we talk about immigration and what I think the president and his administration have done is dramatize this in a way and create this narrative that somehow if you have committed a crime and you've been convicted of a crime that.
We don't have the ability to cooperate. That's not the case. Instead, what he's done is turn this whole equation on his head and made it seem like, hey, just because you're here undocumented, even if you've been here for decades, even if you're a dreamer, even if you pay your taxes, even if you are a positive contributor to society, You don't have any business being here.
The amount of people that I come across across this state. I was just at a immigrant rights group, La Comida, on Staten Island, talking to a bunch of individuals who are fearful for their lives. Children who are waking up every single day, worried if they're going to wake up without their mother or their father. terrorized right here in New York, through no fault of their own.
So let's not get lost in the narrowing of this conversation. We have hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who are in New York, who have been here for a long time, who are positively contributing to our state in a meaningful and thoughtful way. Yes, we can deal with the individuals who have been here committing crimes, and we should.
But let's not narrow the conversation down to the point where it's only about a sliver of the population, which is not reflective of the vast majority of folks who live in this state.
Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate you joining me tonight. Coming up, brand new episodes of our new project, The Blueprint, are out today. One of my guests is my former boss, who knows a whole lot about Democratic politics, and we're going to be right back. Okay, two more episodes of our new podcast, The Blueprint, are out today.
And if you haven't listened yet, this is a new space for us to talk about what the Democratic Party needs to do in this moment. We will still talk a lot about Trump here, but this is an opportunity to talk about what Democrats need to do to win again. Now, in these two new episodes, I talk with Don Lemon about how Democrats should navigate the evolving media landscape we find ourselves in.
I also sat down with my old boss, Rahm Emanuel, who has literally never held back. He had an interesting take on the kind of candidates Democrats should be fielding. One of the things I remember about working for you is you were obsessed with candidate quality. I mean, and the kind of candidates who could win in districts that Democrats didn't always win in.
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