FAA Administrator Quit on Jan. 20 After Elon Musk Told Him to Resign

The Federal Aviation Administration’s leader stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit.

The move by Michael Whitaker means the FAA has no Senate-confirmed leader for one of the biggest crises in its history because he quit before Donald Trump took office.

Whitaker ran the FAA for just a year but announced in December that he would step down on Jan. 20, as the new president was sworn in.

Nobody has taken his place. Last week, specialist aviation site The Air Current reported that industry veteran Chris Rocheleau had been sworn in as deputy FAA administrator, which would put him in acting charge of the agency. The Wall Street Journal had first reported that he would become deputy.

Whitaker’s departure came after he clashed with Musk, who is now in charge not just of SpaceX but has been named by Trump as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is not technically a real government department.

In September Whitaker had proposed fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX, prompting Musk to demand his resignation and promise to sue.

Whitaker, Space.com reported in September, told a congressional committee that the fines were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

But Musk had kept up the attacks on X, at a time when he was campaigning at Trump’s side. On Sept. 17 he accused Whitaker’s agency of harassment, posting, “The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.”

And in a reply to a tweet by an Australian YouTuber who posts videos about space and who has said the FAA “should not exist,” Musk accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars.

“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” he tweeted at Marcus House.

Whitaker had offered no insight into why he decided to leave the post before the end of his five-year term in 2028.

“The United States is the safest and most complex airspace in the world, and that is because of your commitment to the safety of the flying public,” Whitaker wrote in an email sent to staff at the FAA when he quit in December. He called his time at the federal agency “the best and most challenging job of my career.”

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FAA administrators typically serve a five-year term, but an administrator stepping down before the end of that term is not unheard of. Stephen Dickson, Whitaker’s Trump-appointed predecessor, resigned in 2022—just under three years after taking office in 2019.

The troubled agency has long struggled to have proper leadership. Whitaker was confirmed 98-0 by senators in October 2023, after a stand-off between Republicans and the White House over Joe Biden’s first pick, Joe Washington.

Acting boss Rocheleau now faces a massive crisis for the FAA. Its air traffic controllers are responsible for the safe movement of civilian aircraft and will be investigated to understand how a UH-60 Army Black Hawk could fly into an American Airlines regional jet which was about to land on one of the country’s busiest runways.

The FAA had already been wrestling with persistent shortages of air traffic controllers. And this week, air traffic controllers were included in the Trump administration’s offer of buyouts to all federal workers.

The investigation into the crash will be led by the independent National Transportation Safety Board, which is chaired by Jennifer Homendy. She has also clashed with Musk, over the safety of self-driving software in his Tesla cars.