Engineers who work for Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been brought on as senior advisers to the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), sources tell WIRED.
On Sunday, Sean Duffy, secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), which oversees the FAA, announced in a post on X that SpaceX engineers would be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to take what he positioned as a tour. “The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter,” Musk replied. “SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”
By the time these posts were made, though, according to sources who were granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, SpaceX engineers were already being onboarded at the agency under Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities without requiring them to compete for the job,” according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
These new hires come after the terminations of hundreds of FAA probationary employees, and the most deadly month of US aviation disasters in more than a decade.
According to a source with knowledge, none of the SpaceX engineers were fully vetted by their start date. Unlike the very young technologists associated with Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who have been given access to critical systems at agencies ranging from OPM to the Treasury Department to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in recent weeks, though, the engineers identified by WIRED—Ted Malaska, Thomas Kiernan, Sam Smeal, and Brady Glantz—do appear to have experience relevant to the FAA.
Malaska is currently, according to his LinkedIn, a senior director of application software at SpaceX, where he started working in May 2021. Formerly the senior director of data engineering at Capitol One and a senior architect at FINRA, he graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2000 and cowrote a 2015 book on Hadoop application architectures.
Kiernan is currently a lead software engineer at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn. Before joining SpaceX in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair, and is a 2017 Dartmouth graduate.
Smeal is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since September 2021, according to his LinkedIn. He graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2018.
Glantz is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since May 2024 and worked as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.
Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FAA also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In his post on X, Duffy said, “Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.”
