President Trump quickly turned to excoriating the diversity goals of his Democratic predecessors and the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday as he updated the public about the deadly collision over the Potomac River.
Even as he acknowledged that he had no evidence, but was instead relying on “common sense,” he suggested that efforts to hire more people with disabilities and diversify the ranks of the F.A.A. were to blame for the accident late Wednesday that killed 67 people.
Here’s a fact check of his remarks.
What Was Said
“This was before I got to office recently, the second term, the F.A.A. 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 F.A.A. website states they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, little runway.”
“This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there — and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. It’s one of the reasons I won — but they actually came out with a directive. Too white.”
This is misleading. Mr. Trump was citing efforts to recruit people with certain disabilities for air traffic operations that began under his own administration, though the language concerning hiring those with disabilities more generally preceded his first term. And there is no evidence that the government’s efforts to recruit more people with disabilities or the Obama or Biden administration’s diversity efforts were to blame for the crash.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump was referring to information that is not widely known, but at the time of his remarks, the identities of the pilots and air traffic controllers involved had not been made public.
Under Mr. Trump in April 2019, the F.A.A. announced a pilot program for 20 people with targeted disabilities to work in air traffic operations. Targeted disabilities are a set of statutorily defined disabilities, including, but not limited to, those cited by Mr. Trump, that the federal government emphasizes for recruiting. An archived page from June 2019 named the initiative the Aviation Development Program, which “provides an opportunity for persons with targeted disabilities to gain aviation knowledge and experience as an air traffic control student trainee.”
“The candidates in this program will receive the same rigorous consideration in terms of aptitude, medical and security qualifications as those individuals considered for a standard public opening for air traffic controller jobs,” the F.A.A. said in 2019. Those standards include passing an air traffic skills assessment and a medical exam.
According to a Medium post from the agency, one of the program’s first three candidates graduated in 2021 from the F.A.A. Academy and became an air traffic controller trainee that year. It is unclear how many people who graduated from that program are air traffic controllers today.
Moreover, experts said they could not cite a known instance of a plane crash in which diversity efforts had been cited as the sole cause.
“Historically, there has never been an incident, big or small, where D.E.I. or diversity has ever been attributed as a sole cause or contributing cause,” said Tennessee Garvey, a pilot and the chairman of the board of directors for the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals.
He added that the rigorous standards for hiring pilots, mechanics and air traffic controllers were never relaxed to meet diversity goals, but rather that previous administrations and the commercial air industry overall have worked to remove barriers to entry.
Of the more than 900 Black pilots who made up the Tuskegee Airmen, only one became a commercial pilot, he said. And segregation prevented Black men and women from working in the industry until the civil rights movement and lawsuits.
Robert Fowler Jr., a pilot and professor of aerospace at Middle Tennessee State University, said that costs and time required to qualify for a pilot’s license were still significant obstacles. Despite the industry’s attempt to provide scholarships and cast a wider recruiting net, diversity efforts have not been all that successful.
Mr. Trump’s more specific claims about the F.A.A.’s attempts to recruit people with disabilities ignore his first administration’s embrace of that approach.
As Snopes, the rumor-debunking website, has reported, language on the Federal Aviation Administration’s website says that the agency “actively recruits, hires, promotes, retains, develops and advances people with disabilities.” That specific page appeared as early as February 2013 and remained unchanged through the first Trump and Biden administrations. It is no longer on the agency’s website.
The list of the F.A.A.’s “targeted disabilities” cited by Mr. Trump was also present on the agency’s website during the Trump administration. Those include the disabilities Mr. Trump cited as well as hearing, vision, missing extremities and paralysis.
It is also worth noting that the general federal policy for hiring people with disabilities dates back even further, to the Bush administration in 2003 and a 1973 law.
That law, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, initially protected veterans with disabilities from discrimination in federal programs and was expanded through the years to encompass nonveterans and hiring practices.
In 2003, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a governmentwide directive that instructed each government agency to include an annual mission statement, pledge to offer equal employment opportunity regardless of “race, religion, color, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity and sexual orientation), national origin, age, genetic information or disability” and to continually identify and remove barriers to that goal.
While the F.A.A. under several recent administrations and the aviation industry overall have tried to diversify their ranks, including hiring more people with disabilities, progress has been slow.
Annual reports from the F.A.A. show a slight, but not significant, increase in diversity. In 2016, 58.9 percent of its work force consisted of white men and 0.7 percent had targeted disabilities. In 2020, under Mr. Trump, those percentages remained similar at 57.4 percent and 1.1 percent. And in 2023, under Mr. Biden, those percentages were 55.3 percent and 2 percent.
Census data compiled by Deloitte and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that the proportion of white air traffic controllers has decreased slightly from 79 percent from 2020 to 73 percent in 2022.
And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.2 percent of pilots were women and 1.4 percent were Black or Hispanic in 2002; 6.2 percent were women and 5.1 were nonwhite in 2017, Mr. Trump’s first year in office; 5.6 percent and 6 percent in 2020; and 8.8 percent and 7.6 percent in 2023.
Professor Fowler said the primary reason the airline industry has tried to hire across different demographics was simply a strategy to fill a labor shortage as pilots retire: “For example, in 2021, we only have 3.9 percent of pilots who are Black,” he said. “That means there are a lot of other individuals out there who could be qualified to fly.”
For Mr. Trump’s claims about an Obama-era directive criticizing the F.A.A. for being “too white,” the White House also cited a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal organization on behalf of applicants for air traffic controller positions. The lawsuit accused the agency under the Obama administration of discriminating against them because its hiring practices were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.
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