Plane crashes have been happening in the U.S. on a near-daily basis, and while the Trump Administration argues that diversity is the culprit, experts are posing a different explanation for the string of tragedies that have made the front page for the past several months – and it is the likely combination of public perception of social media and years of aggressive budget cuts.

The Trump Administration’s firing of roughly 400 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees came on the very day of President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, in the midst of an already troublesome shortage of air traffic controllers.

With 87 aviation collisions in 2025 as of Feb. 19, many government officials and flight experts are questioning the validity of a historic weakening of aviation safety protocols by the administration. The widening spectrum of public opinion has some citizens blaming diversity, and others pointing to a financial draining of infrastructure as the main source of the problem.

The current stance of the sitting president is that federal diversity and inclusion efforts were to blame for any issues with air travel, and has maintained through numerous press briefings that any cuts to the FAA were strictly towards probationary employees with no direct ties to safety.

There is currently no released data to support the notion that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring was ever linked to safety risks however, or that the FAA suffered from such policies. In fact, a 2023 population estimate by the Census Bureau reports that 78% of air traffic controllers are male, with 71% of the total profession being white.

Though the FAA is not the only government agency gutted by this new administration, the possible consequences of said firings seem to have been immediate. Just nine days after the announcement from the official White House website claiming to “[End] DEI madness and [restore] excellence and safety within the [FAA],” a plane crash in Washington killed 67 people, marking the first fatal commercial aviation collision in the past 15 years.

Soon after, plane collisions in Alaska, Philadelphia, and Arizona, have been just a handful of examples in the past several weeks that have been raising concerns about the safety of both military and civilian air travel. With each collision report seemingly interrupted by another unrelated collision report, U.S. citizens are becoming increasingly aware of the many tragedies afflicting passengers, flight crews, and even victims in neighborhoods hit by debris.

Google Trends shows the dramatic spike in U.S. searches for the phrase “plane crash” in the past three months, showing that the public has taken notice of the uptick in aviation collisions, especially after the inaugural FAA cuts.

Despite the public attention on the subject and structural/economic damage to the aviation industry, the data does not indicate any such spike in crashes in 2025 versus 2024, with 2024 containing over 1400 crashes altogether according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). 

Christianna Silva with Mashable disagreed with much of the public safety commentary in her Feb. 24 article, saying that the fear is not based on data, but instead a poorly timed gutting of FAA personnel right ahead of the Washington D.C. crash. “People are afraid of flying right now – but that fear isn’t based in much data,” she said.

Marco Chan, a former pilot and senior lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University explained social media’s role in this, saying “accidents are getting increased awareness from social media platforms.” Chan goes on to attribute growing social concern over aviation safety to Boeing’s infamous safety failures, a story reported by the Thunderword’s own Brandon Cortes-Yepez last April.

Chan, along with countless other aviation experts have been vocal about the damages the Trump Administration’s FAA cuts will cause, while also considering the 2025 plane crashes are a sign of an ongoing problem with government budgeting and a bi-partisan failure to fund important safety infrastructure.

Jan. through Feb. 2024 had a combined 173 crashes, compared to the current count of 87 so far in 2025. An open letter from the FAA to Professor R. John Hansman from 2018 even signals a broader detriment to aviation safety, citing a planned 2019 budget cut as a “draconian reduction in funding of [more than 50%].”

Though the existence of such issues in the past few years does not necessarily acquit the current administration from the future fallout of eliminating key safety roles in the FAA, proper monitoring of the situations and tragedies does require the general public to stay informed of how trends and public attention can feed into one another and create an illusion of more frequent plane crashes.

Nevertheless, public confidence in air travel has fallen substantially in recent months, and the full picture of air travel safety in 2025 will likely be best examined in hindsight. The FAA is still in danger of further cuts, and the current administration has not yet implemented any preventative protocols to ensure public safety during the layoffs.

*Liv Lyons has been an editor for the Thunderword since 2023. Their short story blog, “Loser Pulp“, is released twice a month.