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,

but 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 because that's where the real high productivity jobs are.

Now, to be clear, the White House was not saying, listen, we need you out of here because we've got people who are better than you,

who are all trained and ready to take your job as air traffic controllers and FAA staff. They're not

telling them, we've got somebody to replace you with. They're just telling the people who do work

there, who do work at the FAA, who do work as air traffic controllers. They're just telling them

now to get out, get out, resign, you're not needed. We do not value you. The next day, on Friday, another horrific plane crash,

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