FAA Diversity Program Trump Blames For Air Crash Was Started In First Trump Administration, Reveals the Washington Post
President Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference, in which he railed against diversity programs and the Biden administration in the wake of Wednesday night’s deadly plane crash over the Potomac River, led to a bevy of fact checks and push back on the idea that DEI somehow was the cause of the air disaster.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler revealed on Friday that a specific part of Trump’s remarks actually hearkened back to his own administration’s past actions, not those of past Democratic administrations.
“Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: ‘hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism,’” explained Kessler of Trump’s remarks, adding:
“Can you imagine?” he asked. “Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress.” He suggested that it was wrong for anyone with those conditions to qualify “for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, a little runway.”
While the investigation as to exactly what caused the midair collision between a Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner continues, Kessler made clear that the policy Trump was trying to blame the disaster on actually began in 2019, during his first administration.
Kessler notes that “the FAA under Trump in 2019 launched a program to hire controllers using the very criteria he decried at his news conference.” The report then breaks down that exact criteria, adding:
The link under “targeted disabilities” is now dead, but the Wayback Machine retains links from June 2017 and January 2021 that show the page was unchanged during Trump’s tenure. The list included:
Hearing (total deafness in both ears)
Vision (Blind)
Missing Extremities
Partial Paralysis
Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy
Severe intellectual disability
Psychiatric disability
Dwarfism
Kessler also shot down the claim from Trump’s presser that he rolled back President Barack Obama’s 2013 diversity policies at the FAA. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best, to extraordinary. … Then they changed it back — that was Biden,” Trump said to reporters. Kessler explains:
For air traffic controllers, the Obama administration in 2013 instituted a new hiring system that introduced a biographical questionnaire to attract minorities, underrepresented in the controller corps. The program was criticized, such as in a Fox News report in 2015, as making it harder for more skilled applicants to get hired as controllers.
But Trump, in his first term, left the policy in place, leading to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 by Mountain States Legal Foundation. The case was due to go to trial this year.
Trump ally Elon Musk has also been pushing the claim that Democrats’ hiring policies are linked the air disaster. “Under the Biden administration, the FAA and other government agencies had absolutely insane hiring practices that endangered the public. President @realDonaldTrump and his team are working rapidly to restore competent personnel to all positions involving your safety,” Musk wrote on X Thursday evening linking to a New York Post article.
The Post’s Aaron Blake replied to Musk and noted Kessler’s report, “We learned about 30 minutes after this post that the FAA **during the Trump administration** launched a program to hire air traffic controllers with these conditions.”
Trump was pressed by ABC News White House Correspondent Karen Travers on Thursday about his claims regarding DEI and the crash. “Mr. President, to be clear, are you saying race or gender played a role in this tragedy?” Travers asked Trump, to which he replied, “It may have. I don’t know. Incompetence might have played a role.”
Read the full Washington Post article here.
