No, the Federal Aviation Administration did not recruit people with intellectual disabilities to work as air traffic controllers.
Despite what Pres. Donald Trump said at a press conference Thursday – “They can be air traffic controllers” – that’s not how disability hiring works, says Chai Feldblum, a disability lawyer and former commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Disability employment law, she says, requires “that the person with a disability must be able to perform the essential functions of the job.”
And that’s how it worked in the Biden Administration, says Kelly Buckland, who was the disability policy advisor to former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Any hiring of people with disabilities at the FAA, Buckland told NPR, “would only be qualified people with disabilities, with the emphasis on qualified.”
Trump suggested diversity efforts at the FAA, including the hiring of people with disabilities, had compromised air safety. He said the crash of a commercial jet and a military helicopter Wednesday night “could have been” caused by diversity in hiring, but noted that the investigation into the cause is still going on.
When asked by a reporter how he could link the crash to a diverse workforce, the President replied: “Because I have common sense.”
“To scapegoat people with disabilities for this tragedy just seems inconsistent with the facts,” Katie Neas, chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States, which advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, told NPR.
“It’s very sad that this stigma against people with disabilities continues to be used as a reason why qualified people can’t be hired.”
There is a recent history of some people trying to link air safety problems to diversity – including the hiring of people with disabilities – not just with Wednesday’s crash but also when a Boeing aircraft lost a door while in flight last January.
Last year, days after the problem with the door on the Alaska Airlines jet, Fox News published a story about a long-time FAA policy to recruit people with disabilities for a wide range of jobs. The Fox report suggested people with intellectual disabilities and significant mental health illnesses were being recruited for key safety positions. The story circulated widely, including in social media posts by tech billionaire and Trump advisor Elon Musk.
In his press conference about Wednesday night’s accident, Trump quoted that Fox News article to say, falsely, that unqualified people with disabilities were being hired in positions like air traffic controller.
The claims were also echoed in an executive order Trump issued the day after he took office last week. That order told the Secretary of Transportation and the FAA Administrator to rescind DEI efforts, and an accompanying fact sheet criticized the Biden Administration for policies that “prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over safety and efficiency.”
At his press conference, Trump criticized Buttigieg, Biden’s secretary of transportation. “He’s run it right into the ground with his diversity,” Trump said.
But FAA records show the agency’s diversity hiring effort existed even before Trump’s own first term.
“Despicable,” Buttigieg responded in a post on X, formerly Twitter. (Let’s say where the post Can we say where the “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, we drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on or watch.”
