Don't Cut FAA Workers Act of 2025

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Bill ID: 119/hr/2431
Last Updated: April 16, 2025

Sponsored by

Rep. Gottheimer, Josh [D-NJ-5]

ID: G000583

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Bill Summary

Another masterpiece of legislative theater, brought to you by the esteemed members of Congress. Let's dissect this farce and expose the underlying disease.

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The "Don't Cut FAA Workers Act of 2025" is a laughable attempt to limit mass layoffs of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees within one year of a major aviation accident. The real purpose, however, is to provide a feel-good Band-Aid for the FAA's unionized workforce and their congressional patrons.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill adds a new section to title 49 of the United States Code, which prohibits the FAA Administrator from carrying out mass layoffs during the year following a major aviation accident. But don't worry, there's an escape clause: Congress can approve a mass layoff with a joint resolution within 60 days. Because, you know, Congress is always known for its swift and decisive action.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The FAA workforce, their unions, and the politicians who pander to them are the primary beneficiaries of this bill. The general public, however, will be treated to a sideshow of bureaucratic inefficiency and potential safety risks due to understaffing or misallocation of resources.

**Potential Impact & Implications:**

1. **Inefficient workforce management:** By limiting layoffs, the FAA may be forced to retain underperforming employees or maintain unnecessary positions, ultimately compromising aviation safety. 2. **Increased costs:** The bill's restrictions on layoffs will likely lead to increased personnel costs, which could divert resources away from critical safety initiatives and infrastructure upgrades. 3. **Congressional meddling:** This legislation invites Congress to insert itself into the FAA's operational decisions, potentially politicizing the agency's management and undermining its ability to respond effectively to aviation accidents.

Diagnosis: This bill is a classic case of "Legislative Myopia," where politicians prioritize short-term gains and special interests over long-term consequences and the greater good. The symptoms include:

* A misguided attempt to address a perceived problem (mass layoffs) without considering the underlying causes or potential unintended consequences. * A blatant disregard for the FAA's operational needs and the importance of efficient workforce management in ensuring aviation safety. * A transparent ploy to curry favor with unionized employees and their congressional allies, rather than prioritizing the public interest.

Treatment: Apply a healthy dose of skepticism and scrutiny to this legislation. Recognize that it is a thinly veiled attempt to advance special interests at the expense of the general public. And for goodness' sake, don't let these politicians near any sharp objects or important decisions.

Related Topics

Civil Rights & Liberties State & Local Government Affairs Transportation & Infrastructure Small Business & Entrepreneurship Government Operations & Accountability National Security & Intelligence Criminal Justice & Law Enforcement Federal Budget & Appropriations Congressional Rules & Procedures
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network

Rep. Gottheimer, Josh [D-NJ-5]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$193,281
21 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$63,374
Committees
$0
Individuals
$129,907

No PAC contributions found

1
AMERICAN EXPRESS
2 transactions
$33,562
2
PAYROLL DATA PROCESSING
4 transactions
$24,762
3
EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEE INDIANS
1 transaction
$3,300
4
SEKAS LAW GROUP LLC
1 transaction
$1,500
5
SANDOR F. GENET & ASSOCIATES, P.A.
1 transaction
$250

No committee contributions found

1
FIRESTONE MILKEN, SARAH
2 transactions
$23,100
2
WEBB, DAN K.
2 transactions
$13,200
3
MCKNIGHT, ANDREW
2 transactions
$10,000
4
CRETELLA, JEANNE
2 transactions
$10,000
5
WOODSIDE, KEVIN E.
1 transaction
$6,600
6
CARSON, RUSSELL L.
1 transaction
$6,600
7
ROSMAN, ELIZABETH
1 transaction
$6,600
8
BOECKMANN, ALAN
1 transaction
$6,600
9
MCLEAN, TERRENCE
1 transaction
$6,600
10
MANN, TRACY
1 transaction
$6,600
11
REYNOLDS, RALPH
1 transaction
$6,600
12
HANOVER, ADAM
1 transaction
$6,600
13
ROBERTSON, WILHELMINA E.
1 transaction
$5,807
14
VIXAMAR, STEVE
1 transaction
$5,000
15
KNIGHTS, CLIFFORD
1 transaction
$5,000
16
CUBERO, MARIA
1 transaction
$5,000

Donor Network - Rep. Gottheimer, Josh [D-NJ-5]

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Organizations
Individuals
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Showing 22 nodes and 29 connections

Total contributions: $193,281

Top Donors - Rep. Gottheimer, Josh [D-NJ-5]

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Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.

Introduction

Low 47.0%
Pages: 112-114

— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac- tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for executive agencies or Congress to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20 A logical place to begin would be to identify and eliminate functions and pro- grams that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies. Congress hoped to help this effort by passing the Government Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal agencies to define their missions, establish goals and objectives, and measure and report their per- formance to Congress. Three decades of endless time-consuming reports later, the government continues to grow but with more paper and little change either in performance or in the number of levels between government and the people. The Brookings Institution’s Paul Light emphasizes the importance of the increasing number of levels between the top heads of departments and the people at the bottom who receive the products of government decision-making. He esti- mates that there are perhaps 50 or more levels of impenetrable bureaucracy and no way other than imperfect performance appraisals to communicate between them.22 The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals. The best solution is to cut functions and budgets and devolve respon- sibilities. That is a challenge primarily for Presidents, Congress, and the entire government, but the OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government. Creating a Responsible Career Management Service. The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution23 with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither — 80 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms. The creation of the Senior Executive Service was the top career change intro- duced by the 1978 Carter–Campbell Civil Service Reform Act. Its aim was to professionalize the career service and make it more responsible to the democrat- ically elected commander in chief and his political appointees while respecting the rights due to career employees, very much including those in the top positions. The new SES would allow management to be more flexible in filling and reassigning executive positions and locations beyond narrow specialties for more efficient mission accomplishment and would provide pay and large bonuses to motivate career performance. The desire to infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service has been widespread in every Administration, whether Democrat or Republican. Democratic Administrations, however, are typically more successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left. Such burrowing-in requires career job descriptions for new positions that closely mirror the functions of a political appointee; a special hiring authority that allows the bypassing of veterans’ preference as well as other preference categories; and the ability to frustrate career candidates from taking the desired position. President Reagan’s OPM began by limiting such SES burrowing-in, arguing that the proper course was to create and fill political positions. This simultane- ously promotes the CSRA principle of political leadership of the bureaucracy and respects the professional autonomy of the career service. But this requires that career SES employees should respect political rights too. Actions such as career staff reserving excessive numbers of key policy positions as “career reserved” to deny them to noncareer SES employees frustrate CSRA intent. Another evasion is the general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards, the opposite of noncareer executives dominating these critical meeting discussions as expected in the SES. Career training also often underplays the political role in leadership and inculcates career-first policy and value viewpoints. Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Adminis- tration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the com- petitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President

Introduction

Low 47.0%
Pages: 112-114

— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac- tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for executive agencies or Congress to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20 A logical place to begin would be to identify and eliminate functions and pro- grams that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies. Congress hoped to help this effort by passing the Government Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal agencies to define their missions, establish goals and objectives, and measure and report their per- formance to Congress. Three decades of endless time-consuming reports later, the government continues to grow but with more paper and little change either in performance or in the number of levels between government and the people. The Brookings Institution’s Paul Light emphasizes the importance of the increasing number of levels between the top heads of departments and the people at the bottom who receive the products of government decision-making. He esti- mates that there are perhaps 50 or more levels of impenetrable bureaucracy and no way other than imperfect performance appraisals to communicate between them.22 The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals. The best solution is to cut functions and budgets and devolve respon- sibilities. That is a challenge primarily for Presidents, Congress, and the entire government, but the OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government. Creating a Responsible Career Management Service. The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution23 with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither

Introduction

Low 47.0%
Pages: 639-641

— 606 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and wasted resources, and artificially increases consumer prices. It is a significant problem that is difficult to address at the federal level. l Congress should ensure that interstate compacts for occupational license recognition that are federally funded do not require new or additional qualifications (that is, qualifications that do not originate from state governments themselves) for licensed professionals to participate. l Congress should ensure that well-qualified licensees are not locked out of the job market by restrictive government programs funded by the federal government. (For instance, medical doctors must complete residency training to practice, and because Medicare provides funding for significantly fewer residencies than there are doctors, sizable numbers of MDs are locked out of the job market every year.) Wagner–Peyser Staffing Flexibility. State agencies that administer unem- ployment benefits and workforce development programs should be able to hire the best people to do the job and should not be required to use state employees if a contractor can do the job better. Further, the federal government should not force a state to use non-union labor or union labor for these positions. l DOL should repromulgate the Trump-era staffing flexibility rule, and Congress should codify it. WORKER RETIREMENT SAVINGS, ESG, AND PENSION REFORMS l Remove ESG considerations from ERISA. Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) investing is a relatively recent strategy promoted by large asset managers that focuses not only on a company’s bottom line, but also on the company’s compliance with liberal political views on climate change, racial quotas, abortion, and other issues. The ESG movement has focused especially on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, ESG proponents advocate for divestment from oil and gas companies or the exercise of investor influence to reduce oil and gas production. ESG considerations unrelated to investor risks and returns necessarily sacrifice trust law’s traditional sole focus on investment returns for collateral interests. And while individual investors may prefer to invest in “green” companies, “woke” companies, or companies with greater board diversity, and may even be willing to sacrifice some financial gains to do — 607 — Department of Labor and Related Agencies so, the question relevant to DOL is whether, and under what conditions, fiduciaries should be permitted to follow this path as well. While Americans are free to invest their own savings however they wish, in ERISA, Congress imposed strict duties on employer-sponsored worker retirement plans as a prophylactic protection of workers’ retirement security in general. Recognizing the unique status of employer-managed retirement savings, in ERISA, Congress required that fiduciaries exclusively seek the best interests of plan beneficiaries. Because ESG investing necessarily puts other considerations before the interests of the beneficiary, ESG investing by plan managers is an inappropriate strategy under ERISA. l DOL should prohibit investing in ERISA plans on the basis of any factors that are unrelated to investor risks and returns. l DOL should return to the Trump Administration’s approach of permitting only the consideration of pecuniary factors in ERISA. However, this approach should not preclude the consideration of legitimate non-ESG factors, such as corporate governance, supply chain investment in America, or family-supporting jobs. l DOL should consider taking enforcement and/or regulatory action to subject investment in China to greater scrutiny under ERISA. Many large retirement and pension plans remain invested in China despite its lack of compliance with U.S. accounting standards and state control over all aspects of private capital. Alternative View. Some conservatives believe that ERISA plan investments should be made solely on a pecuniary basis and the consideration of any non-pe- cuniary factor, ESG or otherwise, should be prohibited. Additionally, other conservatives believe that even though ESG investing is often not a sound finan- cial strategy, it is not wrong for retirement plans to offer ESG investment options so long as individuals explicitly acknowledge and choose to pursue investment options that do not exclusively maximize pecuniary gains. Thrift Savings Plan. The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is the retirement savings benefit plan for most federal employees and many former employees. The TSP is managed by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB). At over $800 billion in assets under management, the TSP is one of the largest retirement plans in the world.

Showing 3 of 5 policy matches

About These Correlations

Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.