On Jan. 29, 2025, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger airplane as it was making its final landing approach at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The crash, which authorities believe killed everyone aboard both aircraft, immediately led to debates about Federal Aviation Administration funding and policies.
At a news conference the next morning, U.S. President Donald Trump rehashed an old talking point used to suggest that a so-called diversity, equity and inclusion program that incentivized hiring people with intellectual disabilities at the FAA was potentially part of the problem:
I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office, and here's one: "The FAA's diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities." That is amazing. And then it says, "FAA says people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce." And they want them in, and they can be air traffic controllers. I don't think so. This was Jan. 14, so that was a week before I entered office. They put a big push to put diversity into the FAA's program.
Trump was apparently referring to a headline published by Fox News and the New York Post on Jan. 14, 2024 — not the week before his inauguration — that suggested this same initiative could have been responsible for an incident in which an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 lost a plug door midflight:
The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer "severe intellectual" disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency's website.
"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 states. "They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."
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The FAA's website shows the agency's guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022. […] All eyes have been on the FAA and airline industry in recent days, after a plug door on a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.
The claims went viral that first time thanks in large part to a January 2024 post on X by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who in 2025 was leading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency:
Outside of misrepresenting the nature of the program, the problem with suggesting that this FAA hiring initiative was a plausible explanation for disastrous events is that the program is more than a decade old and existed during the entirety of Trump's first presidency.
The cited FAA text is real, but the implication that the policy is new, or that it stems from efforts that began under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former President Joe Biden, was demonstrably false. It has been included on the FAA's website since at least as early as February 2013. It was present during the entirety of the first Trump administration.
In response to the 2024 reporting, the FAA told Fox News that its hiring policies do not negate the need for candidates to meet rigorous qualifications, depending on position:
The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions. Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that of course will vary by position.
There is no evidence the program referenced by Trump contributed to either the Alaska Airlines incident or the Army helicopter-passenger plane collision in D.C., the latter of which remains under active investigation. The program was not created by the Biden administration, and it was in place during Trump's first term as president.