Vice President JD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s linking of diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates to the collision between the Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines flight Wednesday night, saying there is a “direct connection” between short staffing and the policies.
“The president made it very clear that he wasn’t blaming anybody, but he was being very explicit about the fact that DEI policies have led our air traffic controllers to be short-staffed; that is a scandal,” Vance said during an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. “Thankfully, it’s a scandal the president has stopped.”
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The collision, which killed 67 people, occurred while the plane was preparing to land at Ronald Reagan Airport. At the time, there was only one air traffic controller managing traffic for both helicopters and airplanes.
Trump pointed the blame to Obama-era and Biden-era Federal Aviation Administration hiring practices, saying “a group within the FAA determined that the workforce was too white.” This prompted the Obama administration to change its hiring criteria for air traffic controllers from a skills-based assessment to having applicants fill out a biographical questionnaire to capture a more diverse hiring pool.
“We have to have our smartest people,” Trump said Thursday morning. “It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are. … They have to be talented, naturally talented. Geniuses. Can’t have regular people doing their job. We can’t have regular people doing this job. They won’t be able to do it, but we’ll restore faith in American air travel.”
Vance told Bartiromo that the diversity mandate was leading the FAA to turn down qualified candidates and thus putting airline passengers‘ safety at risk.
“Let’s just say the person at the controls didn’t have enough staffing around him or her, because we were turning people away because of DEI reasons,” Vance said. “There is a very direct connection between the policies of the last administration and short-staffed air traffic controllers that has to stop.”
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In 2019, a lawsuit on behalf of 2,500 aspiring air traffic controllers and 900 claimants was filed against the Biden administration for continuing Obama-era DEI hiring practices for the FAA.“This started under Obama, but it’s the Biden administration that tried to sweep it under the rug and assert attorney-client privilege over 14,000 documents and has been trying to oppose and dismiss this case,”
Will Trachman, the lead counsel, told the Telegram. “It’s one thing to do it but the Biden administration refused to recognize the error of the FAA’s ways and so they dug in and, in fact, tried to go bigger on diversity measures.”
