in World News Fact Check: Yes, Obama and Biden Had FAA Hire People with Intellectual, Psychiatric, Severe Physical Disabilities
As someone whose father was in the aeronautics business — and who got passed on plenty of his wisdom from a young age — there are two things that I know, even as an unskilled observer, about airplane crashes.
The first is that there’s never one single thing to blame for disasters, especially when it involves airliners; so much redundancy is built into the system that numerous things have to go wrong, either simultaneously or over a period of time, for a crash to happen. The second is that nobody — nobody — knows what caused the disaster in the first 24 hours. (Anyone old enough to remember how wrong we were about TWA Flight 800 being bombed or hit by a missile?)
The collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army helicopter, which claimed 67 lives, may have reached a new low in this department. As Dan McLaughlin pointed out at National Review, people are already blaming Trump administration Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for the disaster just outside of Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C.
Duffy took office the morning before the collision, which more or less rules him out as a factor. Not that this stopped anybody on social media, of course:
“It is not standard to have aircraft collide.”
– Transportation Secretary Sean DuffyYa think?
And yes – he really said this.
This is what happens when Faux News talking heads are put in charge. Duffy and Hegseth both should be forced to resign.
Oh, and impeach trump.
— Eric Slater (@ericsslater) January 30, 2025
However, McLaughlin also noted “that Trump has actually moved to fix a problem with how we hire air-traffic controllers, in order to reorient it toward hiring the best people in order to make air-traffic control safer.”
The question raises itself: We weren’t hiring air-traffic controllers, some of the most critical positions in civilian government employ, simply on the basis of merit?
Fact check: Accurate, unfortunately.
And not only that, we’ve been doing that since Barack Obama’s administration, allowing for those with intellectual, psychiatric, and physical disabilities to receive what we’d now call DEI protections.
Let’s start from an archived 2013 version of the Federal Aviation Administration’s website and its “diversity and inclusion” page.
“Diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond,” the page read. “Because diversity is so critical, FAA actively supports and engages in a variety of associations, programs, coalitions and initiatives to support and accommodate employees from diverse communities and backgrounds. Our people are our strength, and we take great care in investing in and valuing them as such.”