WASHINGTON — During his Thursday press conference about the deadly Wednesday collision between a passenger jet and military helicopter near Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump repeatedly suggested there was a link between the tragedy and diversity hiring policies at the Federal Aviation Administration.
It’s most important to note that Trump provided no evidence whatsoever that there was any such connection. But it’s also worth noting that some of Trump’s specific assertions about the FAA’s push to hire people with disabilities were either inaccurate or missing critical context about what happened during Trump’s own first presidency.
At one point, Trump read from a 2024 New York Post article that said the FAA was “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.” And after reading out part of a 2024 Fox News article on the same subject, Trump said, “This was (on) January 14, so that was a week before I entered office; they put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program.”
Here are four important facts related to Trump’s claim.
Trump falsely claimed the Fox News article was from a week before he entered office: The “January 14” Fox News article Trump cited was, like the New York Post article, actually published on January 14 of last year – not, as Trump claimed, a week before he returned to the presidency in January of this year. In other words, the articles are not evidence that the Biden administration made a frantic last-minute FAA diversity push right before Trump took office again.
The Trump-era FAA had the same language on its website: The FAA’s language encouraging the hiring of people with disabilities, including intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, was featured on the agency’s website throughout Trump’s first presidency and at least as far back as 2013, as the fact-check website Snopes has previously reported. You can click here for the version of the web page captured by the Internet Archive in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term.
The Trump-era FAA also pushed to hire people with disabilities: The federal government passed a law in 1973 that aimed to increase federal hiring of qualified people with disabilities. Like other government agencies, the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, had pushed since at least the George W. Bush administration to increase its hiring of people with certain “targeted disabilities” that create extra barriers to employment. Those include not only intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, but also deafness, blindness, paralysis and missing extremities.
The FAA under the first Trump administration also tried to increase hiring of people with targeted disabilities.
The FAA’s Aviation Safety Workforce Plan for the 2020-2029 period, issued under Trump, said the FAA’s Office of Aviation Safety would, in the 2020 fiscal year, “continue to promote and support the hiring of people with disabilities and targeted disabilities.”
Also during Trump’s first term, in 2019, the FAA announced “a pilot program to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations,” saying that “a key focus for the FAA’s Office of Civil Rights is to identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.” The FAA continued to promote the pilot program in the latter half of 2020, near the end of Trump’s first term.
The FAA’s 2019 and 2020 descriptions of the program emphasized that people with disabilities would not be hired for jobs for which they weren’t capable. The FAA wrote in 2019 that “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.”
That’s similar to what the Biden-era FAA told Fox News for the 2024 article Trump cited: “The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions. Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that of course will vary by position.”
The hiring of people with targeted disabilities is a small fraction of overall FAA hiring: The agency’s annual goal for hiring people with targeted disabilities has generally been in the vicinity of 2%. In the 2016 fiscal year under then-President Barack Obama, for example, the FAA said it had exceeded a 2.33% goal by hiring 89 people with targeted disabilities out of 3,373 total hires, a rate of about 2.64%.
