CNN's Daniel Dale subjected president Donald Trump's claims about a deadly midair collision to a rigorous fact check.
The president blamed his Democratic predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama for the crash, saying they prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion when hiring aviation safety personnel, but Dale said his claim was not based on any facts.
"It is not," Dale began. "I think we have to say first and foremost that there is zero evidence whatsoever that anything to do with the FAA's efforts to hire people of diverse backgrounds, people with disabilities, had anything to do with this tragedy. So I think this is one of these fact checks where it's like, wait, why are we even talking about this? But we're talking about it because the president started a national conversation about FAA hiring practices."
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"So I think it's important for people to know a couple of things," Dale continued. "First of all, at that press conference, president Trump read out a sentence from the Biden-era FAA website about the FAA's desire to hire people with so-called targeted disabilities. Those are significant disabilities like psychiatric and intellectual issues, paralysis, missing extremities, and so on. What he did not mention was that that exact language was on the FAA website under president Trump the entirety of his own administration. We grabbed a screenshot from December 2020 late in his first term, so this was not something Biden invented. In fact, it's been on that website at least since 2013."
"No. 2, this was not just language on a Trump-era website," Dale added. "In fact, in 2019, under president Trump, the FAA launched a pilot program specifically to hire people with these so-called targeted disabilities – intellectual, psychiatric, etc, in air traffic control roles, so they emphasized at the time, these people would have to meet all criteria in terms of medical criteria, qualifications, security criteria. But regardless, this was not something the Biden administration invented, as he suggested."
The president cited a misleading article that appeared last year on the Fox News website that blamed DEI initiatives for an incident where an Alaska Airlines lost a door during a flight, but Dale said he used a sleight of hand to suggest Biden had engaged in an end-of-term hiring burst.
"He's like Jan. 14, [when that article was published], so right before [he] came back, they were trying to get all these people in," Dale said. "I looked at where these articles he was reading out were actually from. It's Jan. 14, 2024 – a year ago – so there is no evidence of some frantic, last-minute Biden push to hire people with disabilities, hire people of diverse backgrounds at the FAA."
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