The first wave of White House-ordered firings at the Federal Aviation Administration included employees who play important roles in the safety of air travel — despite the Trump administration’s assurances that no “critical” staff had been axed.

More than 130 of the eliminated workers held jobs that directly or indirectly support the air traffic controllers, facilities and technologies that the FAA uses to keep planes and their passengers safe, according to the union that represents them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. That alone creates reason for concern about the impact of the cuts, people familiar with the terminations said, even if the initial firings spared the air traffic controllers themselves.

Worries about U.S. air safety have escalated since 67 people died in a crash Jan. 29 between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter in the skies near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

“I would argue that every job at the FAA right now is safety critical,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant who was a longtime official at both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates accidents. These cuts “certainly [are] not going to improve safety — it can only increase the risk,” he said.

One of the people let go last week worked as an aeronautical information specialist, a member of a team of 12 just outside of Washington whose job is to create air maps or “highways in the sky,” the preplanned routes that pilots and controllers use to guide airplanes.

“Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us,” the former employee said in an interview Wednesday. The employee, granted anonymity to discuss their recent firing candidly, said they believe the administration didn’t understand how essential these jobs are for safety but that instead the workers were “targeted just as a senseless line item on an Excel sheet.”

“To put it frankly, without our team ... pilots would quite literally be flying blind,” the former employee said.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said that fewer than 400 people on probationary status were let go at the FAA, but neither his agency nor the White House has provided details about what jobs they held. Instead, he and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have issued statements narrowly focusing on the idea that air traffic controllers and others in “critical” safety roles did not lose their jobs.

“Here’s the truth: the FAA alone has a staggering 45,000 employees. Less than 400 were let go, and they were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago,” Duffy wrote in a social media post this week, echoing a similar posting by Leavitt hours before that said: “No air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated.”

Duffy doubled down in a Fox News opinion piece, writing Wednesday that he “won’t be derailed by misleading media coverage,” calling a CNN headline about the firings “clickbait” and emphasizing again that no controllers were fired.

DOT and the FAA did not return requests for comment. In response to similar questions, DOT has previously referred POLITICO to a statement from a spokesperson saying the FAA continues to hire controllers and has “retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

Despite those reassurances, Guzzetti, the former employee, an aviation official and the PASS union predicted that it won’t take long for the terminations to ripple through an aviation system already strained by a shortage of controllers, aging equipment and a glut of air traffic.

The fired employees include mechanics who maintain and repair the grounds and buildings where controllers work, aeronautical information specialists, office and data assistants, as well as those who ensure airlines follow certain FAA protocols, according to job categories of fired employees provided by PASS.

The aviation industry official said employees from other parts of the FAA were cut as well, including people from its Air Traffic Organization’s safety and technical training division, known as AJI.

The industry official, granted anonymity to discuss their knowledge of the terminations, said this division reviews safety data reports that need additional scrutiny, such as episodes when a plane almost collides with something on a runway. These employees help “identify risks in the system,” the official said. The same division is also studying controller fatigue.

The official also said they have firsthand knowledge of cuts at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, which is instrumental in reviewing aircraft design standards — including issues like the crashworthiness of seats, airframes and other parts of planes.

The industry official noted that some of those let go at the center would probably be involved in offering their expertise to Canadian authorities investigating a Delta Air Lines crash that happened Monday in Toronto, where a regional jet flipped over after landing on a snowy runway. All 80 passengers and crew survived.

Another office where PASS said workers had been fired is a division called Flight Standards — field offices that house the technical experts at the state or local level who monitor whether airlines and other operators are following FAA rules and regulations.

Guzzetti agreed that those firings in particular are cause for concern, saying those in charge of reviewing these certificates already carry a high workload, conducting demanding oversight of passenger planes. By reducing these ranks, these employees “are going to have less bandwidth to conduct their more safety critical function,” he said.

Congressional reaction

So far, concern in Congress has split mostly along party lines in reacting to the cuts.

Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose committee oversees aviation, echoed the Trump administration’s reassurances by saying that those laid off represent less than 1 percent of the FAA’s 45,000 employees. Cruz said he’s “confident the agency can continue to perform its job without a handful of junior hires.”

But Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called Wednesday for the FAA to reverse its cuts, writing in a letter to Duffy that “now is not the time to frantically discard FAA employees that work tirelessly to ensure the safety of every aircraft that takes to the skies.”

And one Democrat says she cannot effectively judge how significant the dismissals are because the administration hasn’t provided details about them.

“I’ve requested from the FAA a list of who was fired. ... I still don’t know who all they were,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who chaired Commerce’s aviation subcommittee in the last Congress, said Tuesday evening. “They have not provided that to me yet.”

In a subsequent letter to the FAA’s acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, Duckworth sought a slew of details about the firings, writing that, at minimum, “we need to know why this sudden reduction was necessary” and “what kind of analysis FAA conducted — if any — to ensure this would not adversely impact safety, increase flight delays or harm FAA operations.”

And Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and a group of 12 other senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on Thursday sent a letter to Duffy saying that the Trump administration risks “undermining decades of safety improvements” by pushing buyouts across DOT, coupled with the probationary cuts for “employees who have dedicated their careers to keeping the public safe.”

“Their expertise, experience and commitment cannot be easily replaced,” the senators said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Commerce’s ranking member, said this is not a good time to cut the FAA workforce and that “we need to make sure that we’re not losing people or equipment that could be critical to the safety of our system.”

Language from one recent termination email said the firing in question was performance-based, according to text reviewed by POLITICO. The letter offered no specifics but said the worker had not demonstrated that further employment would be in the “public interest.”

The email further added that the “nature of your appointment does not provide you the right to appeal your termination under a negotiated or administrative grievance procedure, nor to appeal it to the Merit Systems Protection Board ... on its merits.” The notice came from an email domain called “usfaa.mail.onmicrosoft.com,” which is not a U.S. government address.

A person familiar with the situation, who showed POLITICO the email language and was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said the text appeared to be a template that was used for many fired workers at the agency.

The former FAA employee who helped create and update maps said they had been classified as a probationary employee but had previously worked in the same role in the same department for three years as a contractor.

In three weeks, the employee would have no longer been labeled probationary. The workload is now resting in the hands of nine workers out of the original 12, the former employee said.

“We were already understaffed as it was” with retirements from the previous years, the former employee said, adding that the FAA charting office should be operating with roughly 20 people. “I would hope that Secretary Sean Duffy takes notice that there were critical support to air traffic control employees fired without notice — and that they’re able to rectify that mistake.”