Trump omits role in FAA hiring while blaming diversity for plane crash

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : FAA website featured same language under Trump's first administration The Fox News and New York Post article from which Trump quoted was dated January 24, 2024 -- not "a week before" his inauguration.
53% : "Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring," the FAA's website stated at the time, and also in 2017, 2019 and 2020, when Trump was president.
52% : Annual FAA reports show just 0.7 percent of the agency's workforce had targeted disabilities in 2016, before Trump took office the first time (archived here).
51% : "A week before I entered office, they put a big push to put diversity into the FAA's program," Trump said January 30, as he addressed the mid-air collision between an American Airlines flight and an Army Blackhawk helicopter a night earlier.
51% : Disability hirings under Trump During Trump's first term, the FAA actually announced a pilot program "to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations," which was to enroll up to 20 people for training (archived here).
37% : Billionaire Elon Musk, tasked by Trump to overhaul the government, also shared it on X. The accident in the nation's capital -- the first major US crash since 2009 -- occurred as the airliner approached Reagan National Airport for a late-evening landing after a flight from Wichita, Kansas.
31% : And while the FAA language about hiring people with disabilities highlighted was real, it was not a new addition under Biden and Buttigieg -- or something Trump "changed" during his first stint in the White House, as he claimed after the crash.
29% : Investigations into what happened are ongoing, and Trump offered no evidence to support his broader claims about diversity initiatives, which follow a broader push by his administration to end such policies.
26% : " The FAA under Trump continued to promote the so-called Aviation Development Program in 2020, shortly before he lost his reelection bid to Biden (archived here).
16% : He said Biden's openly gay transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg had "run it right into the ground with his diversity" and claimed Obama "came out with a directive: 'too white.'" "I put safety first," Trump said.

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