Was President Donald Trump right in blaming FAA woke DEI hiring practices for the January 29th mid-air collision?

by Peter R. Breggin, MD

The collision between an incoming passenger plane and a Virginia National Guard helicopter over Washington, DC’s Reagan National Airport on a clear evening on January 29, 2025 killed all 64 American Airline passengers and all 3 military personnel in the helicopter. President Donald Trump responded by in part blaming the woke DEI hiring policies of the FAA, which led the progressive media to ridicule and dismiss him.

But only 9 days earlier, on his first day in office, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump had already signed two related executive orders. One was “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and the other was “Prioritizing skill, not DEI, in federal hiring.”

Two days later, on January 22, a mere one week before the mid-air collision between the airplane and the helicopter, Trump made a prescient order to at once end the FAA’s particularly woke and dangerous hiring practices. It came directly from the White House and was titled, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ends DEI Madness and Restores Excellence and Safety within the Federal Aviation Administration – The White House.”

According to Trump’s “Fact Sheet” on the FAA:

‘MILLIONS OF AMERICANS RELY ON SAFE, TIMELY AIR TRAVEL EVERY DAY: Safety and competence should be the only job criteria for FAA employees, yet the Biden Administration violated the public trust—as well as the law—by prioritizing illegal DEI hiring. … On January 11, 2023, two weeks after a major holiday airline crisis, an FAA system outage caused by employees missteps grounded all flights for the first time since 9/11, an illustration of the importance of FAA competence.”

Trump’s insight into the “madness” at the FAA was no exaggeration. Despite all my decades investigating the stupidity and downright evil conniving and strategizing in federal agencies like the FDA, CDC, NIMH, NIH, and DOJ, I have been dismayed and stunned by the bizarrely dangerous hiring practices at the FAA. This essay is a window into the utter disregard for human life displayed in the federal agency entrusted with protecting our lives in the skies and in our airports. It’s a model for facing the evil that drives progressivism in America.

Trump’s decision to especially warn about and to cancel the FAA’s “madness” more than gave him the right to point to the FAA and to the air traffic controllers as probable culprits in the deaths of 67 people in plain view of the FAA Tower at National Airport a mere 7 days later. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have been broadly praised for his foresight but instead the thugs in the media assaulted him. And those in the alternative freedom movement seem largely unaware of the “coincidence” of his warning one week ahead of time about the FAA’s DEI hiring disaster.

Trump may have been talking with Elon Musk about the FAA, because on January 9, 2024, Musk had already posted his own FAA warning on X:

“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE.”

Leftists have ridiculed Musk for supposedly misspelling DEI as DIE, but knowing Musk’s interest in words and their meanings, it was almost certainly intentional.

What is DEI

DEI stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a left-wing motto which has been used to push extreme progressive politics on the government and on businesses, schools, churches and other institutions in the private sector. In the arena of hiring, it destroys the principles and the laws guaranteeing equal opportunity and creates race-based hiring that favors minorities, especially African Americans.

But racial prioritizing was not nearly the most dangerous part of the FAA hiring policies. DEI hiring under the FAA officially required the most seriously disabled people to be hired ahead of normal qualified people and specifically provided an express method of hiring them outside the usual regulations at the discretion of a staffer who wanted to fill an existing position.

As bizarre, burdensome, and dangerous to the public that it seems, we shall demonstrate how the FAA pushed the hiring of its critical air traffic controllers from people described by the FDA as suffering from severe disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

DEI has been a cutting edge in the moral destruction of the nation’s most cherished concepts, starting with the Declaration of Independence which declares that we are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It also openly challenged Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspiring ideal of judging a man by his moral character rather than by the color of his skin.

Woke DEI hiring rewards less qualified people at the expense of more qualified people and less industrious people at the expense of the more industrious. It crushes advancement through merit and replaces it with a hodgepodge of attempts to raise the less fortunate to higher positions in society and the government. And as in the instance of the FAA, it can put unqualified people into positions where they must make life-and-death decisions requiring a high degree of competence under extremely complex and dangerous circumstances. One mistake in a split second by a single FAA air traffic controller can result in hundreds of sudden deaths. On January 29, 2025, a loss of concentration on an overburdened, stressed controller may be a major contributing factor in the death of 67 men, women, and children.

The Progressive Press Rejects President Trump’s Concerns about FAA Controllers

President Donald Trump quickly criticized former Presidents Biden and Obama for the FAA hiring unqualified “woke” workers, claiming “I put safety first.”

The New York Times quickly replied with “Fact-Checking Trump’s D.C. Plane Crash News Conference and Remarks on D.E.I.” The left-wing newspaper declared in its headline and opening sentence, “Trump Misleads on D.E.I. Policies in Blaming Biden for Plane Crash: There is no evidence that diversity efforts played a role in the crash.”

NPR, a government-funded, intensely progressive radio station, also attacked President Trump for suggesting that the FAA control towers might have caused the mid-air collision. Yet it then observed, “The crash comes after a growing trend of troubling near-collisions near runways across the country,” a fact that in itself should have raised serious concerns about the performance of FAA air traffic controllers.

An NPR diagram and others in the media place the crash as occurring over the Potomac River, directly across from the airport shoreline and very near the start of runway 33 where the American Airline plane was landing. DC plane crash: A timeline of the deadly collision - ABC News Both were flying at the same height with no grossly obvious sudden change in direction to suggest they had been warned at the last minute.

If the FAA air controllers had been paying any attention, their casual communications with each pilot, minutes before the crash, should have turned into frantic emergency warnings to both pilots; but none were made. It’s clear that the controllers originally noticed the airplane and the helicopter were close enough to be warned about each other’s presence, but after that the controllers must have stopped paying any attention to the obviously dangerous situation taking place so close to them. To deny any culpability on the part of those in the control tower seems clearly motivated to protect grossly woke hiring and administrative practices of the previous administration.

How Did the Air Traffic Control Tower Respond to the Impending Nearby Collision?

Essentially nothing happened in the control tower in the seconds before the great ball of fire burst over the airport in front of their eyes. The air traffic controllers simply did not see the tragedy unfolding right there in front of their eyes and on their instruments in that clear evening sky.

Timeline recordings of the event from within the control tower at Reagan National Airport show a complete unawareness among the controllers of the coming mid-air collision. In an unexcited voice, a controller is heard giving what sounds like a routine instruction, when he or someone else interrupts, “Did you see that?” Then another voice describes the collision in mid-air.

The British newspaper, the Daily Mail, provides audio from the tower side-by-side with video of the tragedy under the heading of “Chilling minute-by-minute timeline of tragic DC plane crash.” The details confirm complete unawareness of the impending crash on the part of the tower air traffic controllers.

Again from the Daily Mail, here is a succinct summary of the obliviousness of the air traffic controllers at the time of the event:

That night, an air traffic controller was left to handle both helicopter traffic and manage planes - which should have been a divided duty - according to The New York Times.

Those tasks are usually handled between two people from 10am until 9:30pm.

After 9:30pm the duties are typically combined and left to one person as the airport sees less traffic later in the night.

A supervisor reportedly decided to combine those duties before the scheduled cutoff time however, and allowed one air traffic controller to leave work early.

The FAA report said that staffing configuration “was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”

It remains unclear why the supervisor allowed the worker to clock off early on Wednesday night, just before the midair collision.

At this early point in the investigation, it already seems close to certain that none among the air traffic controllers were aware of the collision disaster taking place over the airport, and in plain sight, until someone exclaimed, “Did you see that?”

Obama Massively Escalated the Declining Quality in Our Air Traffic Control System

The escalating failures of air traffic control were recognized the government’s watchdog agency, the GAO, in 2011, a mere two years into the first Obama administration—too early to completely blame on Obama. The GAO headlined, “Air traffic controller errors soaring.” As always, leftists’ politics obscured the facts. The GAO attributed the problems to human errors in the control towers while the Obama administration attributed the growing errors to better reporting from the control towers. Who are you going to believe?

In the next two years, and documented by 2013, the Obama administration began dismantling the efficiency and safety with which the FAA and its controllers could protect the safety of Americans in the air. Taking the opportunity to be more “inclusive,” the FAA began examining the biographies of people applying for jobs as traffic controllers to preferentially hire those with “diversity” qualifications.

FAA Favors Mentally Disturbed and Intellectually Challenged People in Its Hiring Practices

Starting in 2014 and continuing until shortly after the recent mid-air collision near the Reagan National Airport, the FAA website has described a hiring policy for air traffic controllers that explicitly and strongly favors African Americans over better qualified whites. Even more dangerously, the written policy also favors less qualified Black people over more qualified ones, giving preferential hiring to those who do poorly on a math and science test and who have been unemployed for several previous years. It even describes preferentially hiring “extremely” mentally and emotional disabled people. For a complete copy of the hiring policies, see our version retrieved and saved from the Way Back Machine which is labelled, “Page last modified: July 18, 2014 4:23:02 PM EDT.”

During the decade that the bizarrely dangerous FAA hiring practices were on the FAA website, there were complaints and lawsuits about the systematic hiring of less qualified Black people over more qualified whites. But the story about the same regulations favoring severely physically, mentally and intellectually disabled people over normal people went almost completely ignored. Perhaps it seemed too unbelievable.

Finally, on January 14, 2024, The New York Post headlined its stunning story: “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities’:”

The Federal Aviation Administration 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.

“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

The initiative is part of the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, which claims “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.”

Before it was taken down after the crash, the FAA’s website noted that the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022. This would seem to counter leftist claims that Biden ended the Obama hiring practices when he took office.

The identical earlier copy on the Way Back Machine also notes, “Page last modified July 18, 2014,” indicating how it started during the Obama administration.

Here are excerpts directly off the FAA website page:

Diversity Takes Flight

Diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond. Our inclusive culture is defined by our values and we continuously seek employees from all backgrounds with distinctive ideas, perspectives, insights and talents. As our NextGen technology and systems continue to evolve to meet the aviation challenges of tomorrow, so must our workforce.

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.

The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.

The last sentence beginning with “It only makes sense…” in fact makes no sense at all. The FAA has no legal mandate to make its staff of air traffic controllers reflect the diversity of the community. Indeed, it is probably unconstitutional and illegal, and it certainly defeats the mandate of the agency to protect the people and the skies of America. That mandate requires the hiring of the best qualified people, not the worst qualified.

Trying to meet the diversity principle would be so time-consuming, so energy draining, and so costly, that there would not be enough money left to protect the nation and its citizens from dying in collisions in the air and on the runways.

The hiring policies formerly on the FAA website go on to describe how people with “severe” disabilities [the quotation marks are provided by the FAA] are the most under-represented in the whole Federal workforce so that the FAA must make up for the injustice:

People with Disabilities

Individuals with targeted or "severe" disabilities are the most under-represented segment of the Federal workforce. The People with Disabilities Program (PWD) ensures that people with disabilities have equal Federal employment opportunities. The FAA actively recruits, hires, promotes, retains, develops and advances people with disabilities.

There is no discussion of the impossibilities of most people with severe disabilities becoming able to handle the highly challenging requirements of its mission of “securing the skies.” There is no hint of concern about the obvious truth that lowering the standards in this outrageous manner will inevitably lower the safety of the American people.

The FAA then describes how it must meet the goals of the People with Disabilities program (PWD) because that’s what the “Federal government” is doing:

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.

Mention of the People with Disabilities program led me to wonder, “Is this dangerous outrageously progressive nonsense going on this grossly throughout the government?” I started researching on Google and stepped into a hornet’s nest of millions of citations. I was assuming this was all about the FAA, something crazy that the agency had invented within itself. But no, it seems to be federal in scope.

Consistent with where I was in my analysis, I decided to pursue “Targeted Disabilities.” Right away, I found a defense of the whole FAA hiring program based on the fact it was accepted by President Trump in his first term. I am sure that’s not the only awful thing that President Trump did not notice or did not focus on during his first term when he and his more trustworthy advisors were overwhelmed by the magnitude and intensity of the Deep State. And yes, I too have now discovered that the FAA, the guardian of our air safety, is one more ugly member of the Deep State, and one of the most dangerous among them.

Fortunately, President Trump’s administration has already targeted the FAA itself as requiring the shutdown of its DEI program. But my investigation has now opened my eyes further about the Deep State and its depths of depravity. If the FAA can have become so corrupt, what will deep investigations find within the most powerful and well-known offenders of humanity within places like the DoD, CDC, CIA, FBI, and the like?

DEI regulations could not be fully imposed upon the FAA if it was restricted in any way in its hiring. In order to hire the potentially most ineffective, dangerous candidates, the agency removed all restraints on hiring for the most disabled people in the form of “On-the-Spot Hiring:”

On-the-Spot Hiring

A non-competitive hiring method for filling vacancies with Veterans and/or individuals with disabilities. Managers can choose to fill an open position through the On-the-Spot hiring process given they provide the required documentation for doing so.

And to confirm their determination to spend all the necessary funds they can in this folly, the FAA described “Reasonable Accommodation:”

Reasonable Accommodation

Ensures that employees with disabilities have access to accommodations that suit their needs. This can include modifications made to existing facilities or special equipment.

To fulfill its task to “secure the skies,” the FAA must not be simultaneously tasked with integrating into the agency people who have problems with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

The FAA’s woke task is made even more impossibly self-defeating when the target groups are described as “Individuals with targeted or ‘severe’ disabilities” because they “are the most under-represented segment of the Federal workforce.” This is not a reasonable goal for an agency whose assigned aim is keeping Americans safe in the skies during war and peace. But it might be a goal for a private charity or perhaps a governmental agency prepared to help an “under-represented segment of the Federal workforce,” if it were deemed proper under the constitution.

Of course, some people with various disabilities are already working throughout America in important jobs, in the government and outside it; but hopefully not in life-and-death security jobs when they have ‘severe intellectual disability” or severe “psychiatric disability.” And even more certainly, they should not be working as a preferential policy or be hired at the whim of someone who sees a vacancy they can fill. That is so ridiculous that we have to look beneath the surface of these policies to identify the extreme progressivism and globalism that really seeks to demoralize, weaken, and destroy the United States of America.

It is argued that these bizarre disability practices are implemented out of kindness or concern for the disadvantaged. But in the case of air traffic controllers, the stressors involved might actually harm these people and their ultimate failure on the job, potentially involving deaths, could be devastating to them, as well as to their victims. In addition, the rejection of great number of white candidates and highly qualified candidates has reduced the workforce to dangerous and exhausting lows.

A Relevant Legal Case Moves Toward Trial

By December 2014, a class action lawsuit was brought alleging that the FAA was doing race-based hiring of minorities that was against the law. The suit was primarily against hiring Black applicants who were less qualified than white, rather than with disability issues.

The case was finally certified as a class action in 2022.

In April 2024, Fox News reported further on the case. The lawyer leading the case, former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt, said applicants who did poorly in math were given preferential treatment.

This confirms that even while giving preferential treatment to Black people, the FAA was giving additional preferential treatment to applications who were testing more poorly than others. Other sources have reported that applicants were also preferred if they were poor in science and had been unemployed for at least a few years, confirming that the aim was to hire the least competent they could find.

The lawsuit represents 1,000 whites who claim they were turned down by the FAA based on race. This process was responsible for the current understaffing of the airport towers and for the suggested decline in the competence of many of those who work in them.

Deteriorating Safety

Under the Biden Administration, the safety of American skies and airports has deteriorated in an escalating fashion. A report on January 14, 2024, raised many serious concerns over DEI affecting the performance of both pilots and air traffic controllers were growing:

Several stories and tweets went viral this week calling into question the competency of airline pilots over DEI concerns. Critics such as Elon Musk have pointed to diversity hiring initiatives for airline pilots, assuming that standards are lowered for underrepresented groups, but federal regulations on pilot qualifications are still as strict as they’ve ever been, and diversity training programmes are still bound by these rules.

But where DEI may play a more significant — and dangerous — role is not among pilots but in air traffic control.

Air traffic controllers are badly understaffed and overworked.

More recently in May 2024, the Christian Science Monitor reported that only 70% of new hires could actually pass the previously required academy training tests. It reported:

Serious runway incursions or near misses remain rare. In the past fiscal year, there were only 23 out of 54.4 million flights, and only about a fifth of those were due to controllers’ actions or inaction. However, that marked a 44% increase over the previous year.

Exhaustion from overwork with a diminished workforce is in part blamed by many for the early and increasing errors being made. The “woke” DEI policy, already taken down from the FAA website, may have contributed to a drop in critical staffing, making traffic controllers too exhausted while bringing in less competent “disabled” people.

Government agencies are set up to provide cost-effective, efficient services to the American people. People with disabilities should be provided with rehabilitation in facilities built and staffed for that purpose. These exist in many forms and are already covered by private and government insurance programs. And until now, there were reasonable accommodations for government workers if they could actually perform their assigned tasks without endangering anyone.

What’s Really Happening?

So why have these seemingly irrational and even absurdly impossible and horrendously dangerous practices been so avidly promoted by the left—and even described on their website in this case?

The extreme left that now leads the Democratic party is a branch of predatory globalism whose aim, at any cost, is to take over the world. It is a part of the global governance that is now under attack for the first time by an American president, Donald Trump. The globalists have no interest whatsoever in improving life in America. Born out of a combination of communism and anarchy, its goal is to destroy America with its founding values and to replace them with a collectivist totalitarian government. American will end up being run in the manner that all communist countries are run, the elites and oligarchs and others among the most nasty people in the world, who claw their way to the top—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and now Xi Jinping of Communist China, along with his collaborators in the West in the UN, the WHO, the WEF, the European Union, the banking industry, the Deep State, the Military-Industrial Complex, and all the other highly organized thugs who are seeking to share in the growing world domination.

I know it’s hard to believe that we are facing such an evil enemy. But what else is to be made of Joe Biden giving pardons in advance to himself, his extended family, to Fauci, to assorted murderers, and to perhaps the most vile and violent of all the identified global predators, George Soros.

These people hate America and everything America has stood for as the very first nation in the world to be built on individualism and individual freedom rather than on government control. The global predators must crush us in order to fully implement the emerging world governance. With the election of Donald Trump, the globalists of both the Eastern and the Western Global empires are finally in retreat, but the American people must vastly increase their support of his basic strategies.

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