I Led the FDNY. Don’t Believe Elon Musk’s Nonsense About It.

abdulmanannet77@gmail.comJanuary 16, 2026

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I Led the FDNY. Don’t Believe Elon Musk’s Nonsense About It.

https://www.profitableratecpm.com/f4ffsdxe?key=39b1ebce72f3758345b2155c98e6709c

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January 16, 2026

Musk’s attack on the new FDNY commissioner proves he knows nothing about how modern fire departments work.

Late last year, Elon Musk – a non-New Yorker with no experience in public protection – loudly declared that “people are going to die” because Lillian Bonsignore, a career EMS executive and New York City’s new fire commissioner, was not a firefighter.

Musk’s comment, which predictably ignited a firestorm online, represents precisely the kind of fact-free culture war hysteria that has come to define his social media platform. But his misinformation does more than just piss people off. This needlessly erodes trust in the highly competent government officials charged with keeping us safe.

If Musk actually understood how modern fire departments work, he would know that more than 70% of calls to FDNY 911 are for medical emergencies, while less than 5% are for structure fires. He knows how divisive it is to pit firefighters and EMTs against each other, when our service members now all respond to a wider variety of more complex emergencies, including medical emergencies. In fact, even though the rate of fire decreased, the fires became more devastating. One contributing factor is lithium-ion batteries, batteries that are appearing in Musk’s cars and that firefighters have begged the private and public sectors to tackle.

And he would know that EMTs and paramedics are paid about half of what police officers and firefighters make, forcing many of these civil servants out of the jobs they love and leading to attrition so severe that a dangerous number of ambulances remain unstaffed across the city every day.

This isn’t just a New York City problem; It’s a national trend. Changes in fire service workloads have been occurring for decades. High rates of structural fires in the 1970s created a movement for safer building codes, which significantly reduced the rate of fires (and fire deaths). At the same time, an aging population and a failing health care system have pushed more people into the emergency health care system. The lack of funding to support this change has had negative consequences in most major American cities.

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Cover of the February 2026 issue

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wise appointment of Bonsignore, an FDNY EMS executive for 31 years – and the second woman and first openly LGBTQ person to lead the agency – finally sought to address that reality. Musk’s assertion that Bonsignore’s background also precludes him from supervising the fire department is comically ignorant.

The FDNY commissioner is, and always has been, a civilian executive role, responsible for leading a 17,000-person agency with a budget of $2.3 billion. FDNY marshals do not direct on-site operations. Civilian control of military and paramilitary organizations is a common guiding principle; the US military and many other government agencies operate along these lines.

Most FDNY commissioners have been government or private sector executives before leading the agency. Some, but not all, were firefighters. None have been heads of emergency medical services. Even if you don’t share his political views, you can’t deny that Mamdani’s choice was based on both history and the evolving mission of the department.

But the goal of Elon Musk’s message was never to improve public understanding or outcomes. (After all, people like him despise serious, nonpartisan public service.) It was to attract attention and inflame, and it worked.

I personally know the consequences of this ugly side of public life. For eight years, I worked behind the scenes at the FDNY, solving some of these intractable problems, including EMS. When I became the first woman to lead the agency in 2022, I was subjected to the same kind of online discourse as Bonsignore. I was told I was unqualified because I had not been a firefighter, despite a unique qualification as the only commissioner to have served as an agency administrator for nearly a decade before being appointed. The changes I’ve made to meet this changing mission have sparked online discourse about my gender, ranging from disgusting comments to outright death threats. Unfortunately, none of this addressed the comprehensive debate we need about the future of firefighters or our health care system. All of this was aimed at scoring political and cultural points, and none of it saved a citizen’s life or improved the safety of first responders.

This, however, makes it more difficult for agencies like the FDNY to operate – and that’s a huge problem, because lives really are at stake, not just with EMS, but across the entire failed healthcare system of which EMS is a part. Posts intended to inflame and appeal to our polarized fringes make this even more difficult.

We see the downstream effects every day. People with untreated mental illnesses lie on our streets, while overwhelmed emergency rooms are forced to stabilize and release patients because there are few long-term care options. Police officers are being dispatched away from crime-fighting to deal with mental health crises. Emergency rooms are among the most expensive places to provide care and are unfortunately not sufficient substitutes for mental health services or chronic disease management. Yet private hospital closures and consolidations are pushing more people to 911 and emergency rooms.

None of this is inevitable. And fixing this problem starts with good public servants and experienced leaders, like the new FDNY commissioner, who know what’s wrong, who have the ideas and patience to fix it, and who don’t spend their online lives giving hot-button opinions.

We have the data and operational know-how to reduce 911 call demand and improve outcomes. Telemedicine, house calls, and subsidized transportation allow people to be healthier and avoid emergency rooms, and we should expand them. Programs like B-HEARD in New York have shown that community mental health responses can reduce the likelihood of re-entering the 911 system. The fact that the Mamdani administration appears ready to adopt this initiative on a larger scale is promising. Integrated social services and community care treat the patients who need it most and keep them out of systems that can do nothing but stabilize them.

Police and fire have become effective in fighting crime and fire because we built them to be well-resourced institutions with clear missions and metrics. If we want our health care system to be effective, we must do the same. This work begins by treating EMS responders like the frontline heroes they are, addressing the root causes of the challenges they face and placing people who understand their work – people like Lillian Bonsignore – in leadership roles.

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