White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took the issue of whether DEI policy at the Federal Aviation Administration had anything to do with Wednesday’s fatal airline crash to its most basic denominator while speaking to reporters on Friday.
Leavitt was being forced to defend President Donald Trump’s claim that a lowering of air traffic controller standards under the Obama and Biden administrations may have been a contributing factor in the collision of American Airlines Flight 5342 with an Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., near Reagan National Airport.
Leavitt referenced a known fact: that many would-be air traffic controllers sued the Department of Transportation and the FAA in 2015 regarding the decision to add a biographical questionnaire to the application process, i.e., a DEI policy requirement.
According to the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which filed the suit, “The Obama administration dropped a skill-based system for selecting and hiring air traffic controllers (ATCs), and replaced it with a new system designed to favor applicants on the basis of their race. It makes no sense. Worse yet, it is illegal and unconstitutional.
“The FAA purged its system of thousands of previously qualified, ready-to-hire applicants simply because they did not fit the right biographical profile. The government endangered public safety and owes restitution for this grave injustice.”
Leavitt appeared to reference the 2015 suit, which was filed during the Obama administration, though she referred to the Biden administration.
She continued, “If you are an American who has spent many years studying aviation and you graduate from school and you’re an air traffic controller, based on skill and merit, and then you apply for a job, and are forced to fill out a biographical questionnaire asking you the color of your skin and asking you where you’re from and details that aren’t relevant at all to the job description, I think that deteriorates the morale of people in this industry.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “When you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, do you pray that your plane lands safely, or do you pray that your pilot has a certain skin color? I think we all know the answer to that question.” pic.twitter.com/KriZBmLTEC
— ALX (Vine Nationalist) 🇺🇸 (@alx) January 31, 2025
Leavitt, in effect, said these applicants were denied the opportunity to be air traffic controllers simply because they were white.
Have you ever heard a White House presser line better than this one?
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“That’s unacceptable,” she argued.
Then Leavitt delivered a money line, telling the reporters, “When you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, which every one of us in this room has, do you pray that your plane lands safely and gets you to your destination, or do you pray that your pilot has a certain skin color? I think we all know the answer to that question, and as President Trump said yesterday, it’s common sense.”
Who can gainsay that reasoning? No one in their right mind cares if their pilot is red, yellow, black, white, male, or female. You just want someone who can do the job well.
In 2018, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed aviation attorney and former air traffic controller Michael Pearson, who represented plaintiffs in the suit cited above against the FAA.
Pearson recounted, “In late 2011, early 2012, members of the National Black Controllers Association had a meeting with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Jesse Jackson and some high-level [Department of Transportation] and FAA officials. Michael Huerta [then head of the FAA] was part of those meetings. … And right after that meeting, the FAA put an immediate hold on hiring. They stopped hiring.”
The lawyer contended that the biographical questionnaire, which the FAA added to the hiring process, had nothing to do with measuring applicants’ aptitude to be good air traffic controllers.
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“The creator [of the test] actually notified the FAA of that, and they used it anyway. In effect, that test punished people with any aviation knowledge, any air traffic control experience, any aviation experience, any science experience,” Pearson said.
In February of last year, following near-miss disasters at Reagan National, where Wednesday’s crash took place, and Baltimore-Washington International Airport, The Washington Times editorial board wrote about the topic of lowering air traffic controller standards.
The Times cited a 2013 FAA document titled “Controller Hiring by the Numbers,” which asked, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
The news outlet noted in 2012 that the FAA temporarily halted hiring of new controllers and replaced its race-blind hiring rules with the “biographical assessment” stratagem intended to hire more minorities.
“More than 3,000 top-performing, motivated applicants lost out because they weren’t members of this ethnic club,” the Times said.
Applicants who had scored well in the AT-SAT, which tests aptitude to be an air traffic controller, but not under the new “biographical assessment” sued, as noted above.
“After Congress forced the FAA to drop the quiz in 2018, many former applicants reapplied and have since become controllers. Their careers were set back several years for no good reason,” according to the Times.
Pearson told Fox News Thursday night regarding the American Airlines crash, “This is a preventable disaster. … The system has been under attack through the DEI and the FAA bowing to wokeness since 2010 — since the Obama administration.”
“The lack of staffing is directly attributable to the Obama administration,” he argued.
🚨 This is bad.
Fmr. Air Traffic Controller Michael Pearson: “This is a preventable disaster. The system has been under attack due to DEI and the FAA bowing to wokeness since 2010 — since the Obama administration.”
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 31, 2025
As Leavitt and Trump have both said, a return to common sense dictates that air traffic controllers be hired based on merit, and no other criteria.
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