The Federal Aviation Administration will likely come under intense questioning following the fatal plane crash Wednesday night outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
But who exactly is leading the FAA, following Mike Whitaker’s resignation as administrator when President Donald Trump assumed office last week, is something many are wondering. Administrators of the FAA and similar agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, are nominated to serve five-year terms in an effort to insulate them from politics.
It appears that the first major air disaster in the United States since 2009 has occurred while the FAA does not have a permanent leader. At this time, Trump has not named a person to head the FAA permanently.
As a press conference on the plane crash was ending Thursday morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy did not respond to a reporter’s question asking who is in charge of the FAA, according to the Wall Street Journal. Rocheleau would serve as the FAA’s acting chief while the Trump administration selects a nominee for Senate confirmation.
Chris Rocheleau, who was most recently chief operating officer of the National Business Aviation Association, previously was the FAA’s acting safety chief before leaving the agency in 2022. He has reportedly been running the agency with Liam McKenna, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who was appointed the agency’s chief counsel.
In 2023, the Senate confirmed Whitaker to the role after a 19-month vacancy. The post had been vacated in March 2022 when Steve Dickson, whom Trump nominated, stepped down midway through his five-year term.
In the last few years, there have been multiple close calls of near collisions between aircraft at various airports across the U.S., including at Reagan. Air traffic controllers do not change between presidential administrations and are not political in nature.
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“Air traffic controllers do not come and go with the change of an administration,” former Transportation Department Inspector General Mary Schiavo said on CNN. “The politics of the situation should have had no impact whatsoever on air traffic controllers.”
Officials said Thursday that they do not expect to find any survivors of the plane crash and have moved their operations from rescue to recovery.
