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 Duffy

Ya 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.”

Part of this included hiring those with “targeted disabilities”: “Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

In 2019 — under the Trump administration, it must be said — the FAA “announced a pilot program to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.” Again, it emphasized that it was looking “to identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.”

In an archived page from December 2024, the FAA touted “‘On-the-spot’ special appointment authority” to hire individuals via a “non-competitive hiring method,” one of which involved “hiring people with severe physical disabilities, psychiatric disabilities, and intellectual disabilities.”

The initiative was last updated on March 23, 2022, according to Fox News.

Moreover, the Biden administration was already being sued because of discriminatory hiring practices for air-traffic controllers.

“From 1989 to 2013, the Collegiate Training Initiative program was a pipeline to a career in air traffic control. The program aimed to ensure future air traffic controllers had the skills and knowledge necessary to carry out the job,” the Washington Times reported in May 2024.

“More than ten years ago, the Obama Administration scrapped 1000 qualified candidates. The administration’s justification was that the pool of applicants was not diverse enough, so they would be purged from consideration. Instead of hiring candidates with the most competency, individuals were elevated for hiring consideration based on their race.

“Despite their intent to expand the air traffic control hiring pool via DEI, the FAA has recently admitted they are woefully understaffed and that current air traffic controllers are severely overworked. One report found that only 3 of the 313 air traffic facilities around the nation met the FAA targets last year. This has forced the agency to admit safety could be jeopardized. To mitigate such danger, the agency has ‘at times halted departures or otherwise slowed down air traffic.’”

Trump has reversed this hiring policy; a fact sheet from the White House said the administration planned “to immediately stop Biden DEI hiring programs and return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring” and would require “the FAA Administrator to review the past performance and performance standards of all FAA employees in critical safety positions and make clear that any individual who fails to demonstrate adequate capability is replaced by someone who will ensure Americans’ flight safety and efficiency.”

Now, let me reiterate what I said at the top: We have no idea what caused this crash, and we will not know the exact details for some time. What we do know is that, when a collision between to aircraft is involved, the specter of insufficiently adept air-traffic control monitoring raises itself as a potential factor.

And whatever the case, these social media posters had much more to be alarmed about than those blaming Sean Duffy for something he clearly had no control over:

FAA recruits workers with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities
This is nuts! https://t.co/YkNys6QdMP

— Mark Groubert (@lordbuckly) January 15, 2024

Uh, #FAA can you be more specific? #DEI @PeteButtigieg #InclusionTakenTooFar ? #AirlineSafety #TransportationSafety pic.twitter.com/cOeSu1NOUd

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) January 15, 2024

Current job listing for an air traffic controller on the FAA’s website is open to people with disabilities including psychiatric & intellectual delays.

Doesn’t it make you feel safe knowing your air traffic controller can have an intellectual disability or have a seizure while… pic.twitter.com/7H8QXQ39WR

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 6, 2024

Meaningless DEI initiatives are infuriating enough on their own accord when they prioritize identity over merit in non-critical positions. When the results can be deadly, however, infuriating turns to chilling.

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