On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy denied that they had fired any air traffic controllers, but then said that they did and proceeded to toss up a big old word salad:
In the safety mission of the FAA, like air traffic controllers, no one was cut. We actually have staffed up, we’ve hired more air traffic controllers during this time. There were probationary workers that were let go, those are employees who were there less than a year, and again, we excluded the safety positions, most of them have come back. So again, to say, the FAA has 46,000 employees, and if you lost 350, is this affecting our safety mission? There’s a lot of things the FAA does, but for us, safety is key, so no, we’ve retained all those safety positions.
Duffy then xitted out the video and blamed the “Fake News” for “peddling lies” about the air traffic controllers being fired:
