Investigators gather pieces of wreckage Jan. 30 along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., after American Airlines flight 5342 on approach to Reagan National Airport crashed into the river after colliding with a U.S. Army helicopter. Sixty-seven people were killed. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

WSHINGTON — Elon Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is going to work with U.S. aviation authorities to “rethink” the nation’s airspace, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.

Duffy said he had spoken with Musk and that DOGE is going to help with plans to modernize the U.S. aviation system.

“We’re going to rethink our airspace, and we’re going to do it quickly,” Duffy said Wednesday during remarks at an event in Washington, without offering specifics about potential changes. In a separate post on Musk’s X social media platform, Duffy said the DOGE team will “plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”

Musk chimed in with a post of his own, saying DOGE plans to make “rapid safety upgrades” to the nation’s air traffic control system.

The remarks underscore how the organization led by the world’s richest man is rapidly spreading across the federal government in what they say is an effort to boost efficiency and root out waste. The national airspace system overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration manages the safety and movement of thousands of aircraft across the country, making it some of the federal government’s most critical infrastructure.

“We’re going to upgrade and make sure that America has the most innovative, technologically advanced air system, air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “That’s going to make it safer, and it’s going to make it more efficient.”

DOGE was envisioned as a broad cost-cutting and deregulation agency, but Trump’s executive order that created it narrowed that mandate to modernizing federal information technology.

But Musk’s DOGE teams have fanned out across the government to cancel leases, shrink the workforce and even shutter the agency that administers foreign aid. DOGE’s involvement in managing U.S. airspace will raise questions about Musk’s conflicts of interest, since the FAA regulates his rocket company, SpaceX.

A U.S. Army helicopter that collided midair with an American Airlines regional jet last week revived longstanding concerns about a U.S. shortage of air traffic controllers and their reliance on aging technologies. The accident killed 67 people, making it the worst U.S. civil aviation disaster in decades.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office warned in a December report that the FAA needed to take urgent action to update its air traffic controller systems, noting that a 2023 risk assessment found that 76% were either unsustainable or potentially unsustainable.

Investigators have said the control tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport had five staffers working at the time of the crash, one of whom was overseeing both airplanes on approach to land as well as helicopter traffic in the busy nearby airspace.

Duffy also said he’ll announce a plan in the coming days to “surge” more air traffic controllers into the system, without offering specifics. He did not say whether DOGE was part of that plan.

“It’s going to take us time to get more air traffic controllers in the space,” Duffy said at the event. “But we have a plan in place that’s going to allow us to surge them and I’m going to announce that in the next couple of days.”

The FAA’s air traffic control organization has seen its ranks dwindle over the last decade, while the COVID-19 pandemic and government shutdowns have hampered efforts to maintain full workforce levels.

The Biden administration had also worked to close on that gap by boosting hiring and introducing a program that allows certain universities and colleges to offer curriculum on par with what’s provided at the Air Traffic Controller Academy to increase the FAA’s controller training pipeline.