President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into the safety of American aviation yesterday, just hours after the collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter over Reagan National Airport.
The mandate follows Trump’s order of 10 days ago to the secretary of transportation and administration of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to stop race-based hiring.
And now, it seems clear, former President Barack Hussein Obama is directly responsible for the crash. The air traffic control team at Reagan was understaffed because of Obama’s diversity, equity, and inclusion mandate, a former air traffic controller said.
The Order
On January 21, in “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation,” Trump said racially discriminatory hiring at the FAA must stop.
Noting that the FAA tracks “45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers” every day, Trump said the Biden administration’s FAA “betrayed its mission by elevating dangerous discrimination over excellence.”
That “dangerous discrimination over excellence” included hiring the blind, deaf, and insane.
“Illegal and discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring, including on the basis of race, sex, disability, or any other criteria other than the safety of airline passengers and overall job excellence, competency, and qualification, harms all Americans, who deserve to fly with confidence,” Trump said:
It also penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color. FAA employees must hold the qualifications and have the ability to perform their jobs to the highest possible standard of excellence.
Trump ordered Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and acting FAA chief Chris Rocheleau to stop the discrimination immediately.
He also fired off a memo to Duffy and Rocheleau to investigate airline safety in light of the FAA’s hiring practices.
The crash “follows problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations that minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA),” Trump wrote:
The Obama Administration implemented a biographical questionnaire at the FAA to shift the hiring focus away from objective aptitude. …[T]he Biden Administration egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all executive departments and agencies to implement dangerous “diversity equity and inclusion” tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with “severe intellectual” disabilities in the FAA.
The investigation will include a review of hiring decisions for the last four years and replacing personnel “who do not meet qualification standards.” It will also include a “systematic assessment of any deterioration in hiring standards and aviation safety standards and protocols during the Biden Administration.”
As The New American reported yesterday, Obama’s DEI initiative in 2013 led to a class-action lawsuit against the FAA, which rejected at least 1,000 applicants because they were “too white.”
Representing the applicants the FAA turned away, Mountain States Legal Foundation sued the agency.
Obama’s Fault
When the two aircraft collided, The Associated Press reported, one air traffic controller was doing the job of two. And that, former air traffic controller Michael Pearson told Fox talker Laura Ingraham, is Obama’s fault. He said the crash was a “preventable disaster.”
“The system has been under attack due to DEI and the FAA bowing to wokeness since … the Obama administration,” Pearson fumed:
The lack of staffing is directly attributable to the Obama administration terminating the lists of eligible, well-trained air traffic control[lers] in 36 universities across the country in 2013 because they were too white.
The FAA also implemented an “immunity program” to protect incompetent air traffic controllers. Before Obama, an air traffic controller who permitted two planes to fly too near each other would be decertified and retrained, Pearson said.
Now, he said in so many words, nothing happens to the incompetent.
A Betrayal of Americans
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, told Fox News that hiring incompetents is a “betrayal” of Americans who expect to fly safely.
“It is a betrayal of the American people to say that you are going to prioritize the hiring of people with severe intellectual defects to serve at … the entity responsible for ensuring that every single passenger over American airspace safely takes off, safely flies and safely lands,” Miller said.
Not hiring the best and brightest not only endangers the safety of airline passengers, but also hampers the agency from improving its performance and innovating technology.
“And what it does over a period of time to an agency is … it prevents that agency from developing the new systems, the new protocols, the new programs, the new priorities, to constantly adapt and evolve airline safety,” he continued:
Because instead you’re always playing catch up. You’re always playing clean up. You’re trying to put out fires. You’re trying to stop things from falling apart. You can’t build. You cannot learn. You cannot grow because you’re not hiring based solely on qualification and competence. They’ve been playing games with America’s public safety in a way that is unconscionable.
Driving home Miller’s point is more video of Phil Washington’s confirmation hearing to head the FAA. Biden appointed Washington, who runs Denver International Airport. The first video that surfaced showed Washington’s inability to answer simple questions.
A second features Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz grilling Washington, and demonstrates Washington’s utter lack of experience.
In a lame attempt to pin blame for the crash at Reagan National Airport on Trump, Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas falsely claimed that Trump’s freeze on hiring new federal workers applied to air traffic controllers.
The White House’s newly created Rapid Response X feed answered the far-left congresswoman: “Wrong. Federal air traffic controllers are EXEMPT from the hiring freeze. Stop lying.”
Rapid Response also provided a link for Crockett to apply for the job.
