President Donald Trump blamed diversity hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration for Wednesday night’s deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C. — days after his new administration banned diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, including at the FAA.
Asked why he singled out DEI as a cause of the crash when an investigation was just getting underway, Trump said: “Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level.”
At the Thursday briefing, Trump complained the FAA — which has been embroiled in a class-action lawsuit over its hiring practices for the past decade — is “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.”
The president explained he wasn’t “blaming the controller” on duty for the collision, in which a small inbound commercial jet from Wichita, Kansas, struck a military helicopter at Ronald Reagan National Airport, leaving no survivors. “I’m saying there are things you can question.”
The FAA, which is confronting a shortage of air traffic controllers, has weathered criticism for a Barack Obama-era shift in hiring that made a biographical survey its first-line screening tool to encourage more diversity. It resulted in a class-action lawsuit from a group of candidates who say they were passed over after spending thousands of dollars and years studying.
The job itself requires rigorous training and an intense psychological and skills assessment. Until last year, the FAA did all its training in-house. But demand for controllers forced the agency to partner with two colleges to be able to offer more training slots.
Trump claimed both of his Democratic predecessors attempted to lower standards for FAA hiring that he later reversed in office, most recently with an executive order forbidding DEI efforts at the FAA — just one of the executive actions Trump signed last week seeking to root out any focus on race or gender in the federal government.
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump said. “I put safety first. Obama, [Joe] Biden and the Democrats put policy first. And they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”
Trump, however, doesn’t appear to have changed any of the Obama-era standards himself. NBC’s chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander pointed out during the briefing the list of standards on the FAA’s website that Trump cited hadn’t been updated since 2013.
“I changed the Obama policy,” Trump insisted, “and we had a very good policy, and then Biden came in and he changed it, and then when I came in two days, three days ago, I signed a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence, OK?”
Flanked by his new DOT secretary, Sean Duffy, Trump bashed Duffey’s predecessor, Democrat Pete Buttigieg.
“He’s just got a good line of bullshit. The Department of Transportation, his government agency charged with regulating civil aviation ... he runs it right into the ground with his diversity,” Trump said.
Buttigieg responded online, calling it “despicable” that Trump would seek to politicize the disaster.
“As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
Several Senate Republicans were reluctant to agree with Trump that DEI was responsible for the crash, which is under investigation.
“I think we should wait to see the results of that investigation,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “Obviously one or more people made a devastating and catastrophic mistake, but we should wait to examine the evidence and understand exactly what went on.”
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“I don’t know what happened last night,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “I don’t know if there’s any DEI component to it or not. I’ve heard nothing about that.”
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.