Engineers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been appointed as senior consultants to the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), according to sources cited by WIRED.

On Sunday, Sean Duffy, the secretary of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, revealed on X that SpaceX engineers would be touring the Air Traffic Control System Command Center located in Virginia. Musk responded, stating, “The safety of air travel transcends politics. SpaceX engineers will contribute to making air travel safer.”

However, sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, indicated that by the time of these announcements, SpaceX engineers were already being assimilated into the agency under Schedule A—a special hiring authority that permits government officials to employ individuals with disabilities without a competitive hiring process, as noted by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

These new appointments follow the layoffs of numerous probationary employees at the FAA and come during one of the most fatal months for US aviation disasters in over a decade.

According to an insider, none of the SpaceX engineers had undergone complete vetting prior to their starting date. In contrast to the younger technologists linked to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who have accessed critical systems across various agencies, including OPM, the Treasury Department, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in recent weeks, the engineers highlighted by WIRED—Ted Malaska, Thomas Kiernan, Sam Smeal, and Brady Glantz—possess qualifications pertinent to the FAA.

Ted Malaska is presently a senior director of application software at SpaceX, having joined the company in May 2021. Previously, he was the senior director of data engineering at Capital One and a senior architect at FINRA. He graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2000 and co-authored a 2015 publication on Hadoop application architectures.

Thomas Kiernan operates as a lead software engineer at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining the team in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair and holds a degree from Dartmouth, earned in 2017.

Sam Smeal has been with SpaceX as a software engineer since September 2021. He earned his degree from Saint Vincent College in 2018.

Brady Glantz, also a software engineer at SpaceX since May 2024, previously served as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021 and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.

Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not respond to requests for comments immediately. The FAA also has not provided a response yet.

In a post on X, Duffy stated, “Knowing that the media (and Hillary Clinton) may claim that Elon’s team is receiving special treatment, I want to clarify that @FAANews often conducts tours of the command center for both media and businesses.”