Ilhan Omar Lashes Out At Elon Musk As ‘Dumbest’ Person On Earth After FAA Recruitment Plea

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah that DOGE master Elon Musk is “one of the dumbest, luckiest people” on Earth after Musk’s plea for air traffic controllers to come out of retirement.

Musk sent out a post on X/Twitter pleading for air traffic controllers after a rash of air disasters and well-publicized job cuts in other FAA posts.

On Thursday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, Obeidallah asked Omar about Musk’s message:

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: He literally posted on X. There’s a shortage of top notch air traffic controllers. If you have retired but are open to returning to work, please consider doing so. How about you don’t fire as many as you did? So you’ve got–.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: And that that the retirement thing for air traffic controllers is also again, it just shows how much he doesn’t know.

I know people talk about him as a genius, but to me, I think he’s probably one of the dumbest, luckiest people to to exist on, on this earth.

The retirement age for air traffic controllers, it’s 55– or 25 years of service. So we– unless we raise their retirement age, if they were retired, they’re not coming back. Right. Like they they were set to retire.

And it is a taxing job. Like on Friday, I went to the FAA in the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport to check in on the air traffic controllers. What we learned is that, you know, they’re they’re at 87% capacity.

It takes three years for somebody to be onboarded to to be full, fully certified in all the the equipment and become self-sufficient in order for them to be air traffic controller. They have 11 people on in that pipeline.

But they’re also set to have more than that in in retirement. So they’re they’re not going to be at 100% capacity anytime soon.

We also know that for the smaller airports, whether it’s Crystal that’s in in in my district or the, the, you know, Duluth or others. That’s also true. You know, they’re at 60% capacity. At 70% capacity. Some are at 40% capacity.

What they’re also firing is not just air traffic controllers. They’re firing the people who support them. So technicians, when their equipment goes down, the people who make sure that their equipment is up and running so that they can actually direct the flights and where to go.

Watch the clip above via SiriusXM’s The Dean Obeidallah Show.