“The environment around which we choose pilots or air traffic controllers, as the president pointed out correctly yesterday, better be the highest possible standard,” Hegseth told Fox News’s Fox and Friends. “The best of the best who are managing a flight a minute and managing radio traffic.”

When it comes to hiring military personnel, pilots, or air traffic controllers, people’s identities come second to their ability to keep people safe, Hegseth said.

“I don’t care about your background, you gender, or your skin color, I want the best,” he said. “When the president says merit-based and colorblind, he’s exactly right across government.

“So, he’s correct to point out, at the FAA or in our flights, it should not be about anything other than excellence. That’s it, excellence. I don’t care about the color of the skin of the pilot on my plane or of the air traffic controller.”

President Donald Trump ripped into the aviation DEI hiring policies during a Thursday press conference and blasted the Federal Aviation Administration diversity push for hiring, which included a focus on people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.

“You must have only the highest standards to work in our aviation system,” Trump said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put the policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

The push for DEI-based quotas will end at the Defense Department, Hegseth said.

“It’s been made very clear across all of our services and commands, it is merit only, and that means we’ll get the best of the best, and that’s what our taxpayers and the American people expect and deserve,” he said.

“In the business of war-fighting is in, which the Defense Department is in, if you don’t have the best of the best, you lose people, and that’s why this is so important.”