Happy to have you here. I'm also very relieved to not be leading the show tonight with news of yet another plane crash.

On the second week of this presidency, the new president, of course, caused mass confusion among everyone who works with the federal government, mass confusion, mass anxiety.

When he sent all federal employees a weirdly worded spam-like email message telling

them all to resign. That went out from the White House on Wednesday morning to everyone in the

government, including, say, air traffic controllers and FAA staff and people who work for the National

Transportation Safety Board.

That went out Wednesday morning. That night, Wednesday night, is when there was a

mid-air collision plane crash over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., killing 67 people.

Absolutely horrific tragedy. The day after that, Thursday, with rescue and recovery operations

underway in the river, it finally occurred to the White House that maybe they should name someone

to be the acting head of the FAA. Maybe there should be somebody in charge of aviation safety

in America.

There had been an FAA chief who was right in the middle of his term, but he had been threatened by Trump's top donor, Elon Musk.

Musk had demanded the resignation of the head of the FAA, and so the head of the FAA resigned

on inauguration day, and the Trump administration had not gotten around to

replacing him. It was not until a press conference about the plane crash that the president

announced that he had decided to get around to naming an acting director of the FAA.

Still, though, that same day, after the plane crash, the White House sent out another email

message to air traffic controllers and FAA staff and NTSB staff and all the rest, again,

reiterating that they should resign their job, telling them that their jobs working for the

American people, working for the federal government,

those are, quote, low productivity jobs, and they should get out and go work in the private sector

...