In an interview with Fox News set to air on Sunday morning, Vice President JD Vance doubled down on Trump’s rhetoric about DEI — or diversity, equity and inclusion — in the federal government.
Asked if there was any evidence that any of the air traffic controllers involved in Wednesday evening’s airplane and helicopter collision in Washington, D.C., were DEI hires, Vance didn’t give “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo a clear answer.
“This is not saying that the person at the controls is a DEI hire, but let’s just say — first of all, we should investigate everything — but let’s just say the person at the controls didn’t have enough staffing around him or her because we were turning people away because of DEI reasons,” Vance said.
He added, “The president made very clear that he wasn’t blaming anybody but he was being very explicit about the fact that DEI policies have led our air traffic controls to be short-staffed.”
On Thursday, in the aftermath of the incident that killed 67 people, Trump blamed the accident on the policies of former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, who according to Trump lowered the standards of hiring in the Federal Aviation Administration.
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. You remember that. Only the highest aptitude they have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers,” Trump said, referring to his first term.
“When I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse,” the president added.
In a memo on Thursday, the president said the Obama and Biden-era hiring standards “minimized merit and competence” at the FAA.
He added in the memo that the 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.”