President Donald Trump has been playing the blame game with the deadly midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk – pointing the finger at former Presidents Obama and Biden as well as DEI hiring practices. It’s almost a certainty that this crash had nothing to do with these people and things, but that didn’t stop Trump from saying the two Democrats imposed “a big push to put diversity” that he claims weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.
Here’s the issue with Trump’s fingering of Biden and Obama: the FAA began these diversity programs during his first term in office, according to the Washington Post. While reading through a Fox News article on live television, Trump listed conditions that he implied would disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.” Trump clearly did not realize that the very thing he was rallying against is something he once – tangentially, at least – supported.
Here’s what he went on to say, according to the Post:
“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.”
Trump applied a sort of Michael Scott “Snip-Snap-Snip-Snap” theory to DEI hiring practices for air traffic controllers. During the press conference, he said, “I changed the Obama standard from very mediocre at best, to extraordinary. … Then they changed it back – that was Biden.” I guess he just hasn’t had the chance to switch it back again.
Here’s more from the Washington Post:
Trump’s claim was repeated in an executive order Trump signed Thursday that ordered a review of aviation safety: “During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence.”
That’s false. In his first term, Trump left the standards unchanged.
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.
Moreover, the FAA under Trump in 2019 launched a program to hire controllers using the very criteria he decried at his news conference.
“FAA Provides Aviation Careers to People with Disabilities,” the agency announced on April 11, 2019. The pilot program, the announcement said, would “identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.”
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
The June 2019 webpage for the Aviation Development Program (ADP) — also now removed but still visible on the Wayback Machine — said the program “provides an opportunity for Persons with Targeted Disabilities (PWTD) to gain aviation knowledge and experience as an air traffic control student trainee.” Participants would get up to one year of experience in an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), with a possibility of getting a temporary appointment at the FAA Academy.
Back in 2021, under the Biden Administration, the FAA announced that one of the first three ADP candidates graduated from the FAA Academy and became an official air traffic control trainee. That announcement said the program was conceived when an air traffic manager met a quadriplegic student who had assumed he would never qualify to be a controller due to his condition, the Post reports. The administration has stressed that participants must still meet the same qualifications as any other air traffic controller student.
The double-think of Trump and the rest of the Republican party is so fascinating in this scenario. On one hand, it’s an objectively good thing that these practices were put in place while he was the president the first time. On the other, it’s very disheartening to see him so quick to blame these very practices on that awful crash.