Washington Post - In the [airport crash] news conference, Trump said Obama weakened standards and “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best, to extraordinary. … Then they changed it back — that was Biden.”
Trump’s claim was repeated in an executive order Trump signed Thursday that ordered a review of aviation safety: “During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence.”
That’s false. In his first term, Trump left the standards unchanged.
For air traffic controllers, the Obama administration in 2013 instituted a new hiring system that introduced a biographical questionnaire to attract minorities, underrepresented in the controller corps. The program was criticized, such as in a Fox News report in 2015, as making it harder for more skilled applicants to get hired as controllers.
But Trump, in his first term, left the policy in place, leading to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 by Mountain States Legal Foundation. The case was due to go to trial this year.
Moreover, the FAA under Trump in 2019 launched a program to hire controllers using the very criteria he decried at his news conference.
“FAA Provides Aviation Careers to People with Disabilities,” the agency announced on April 11, 2019. The pilot program, the announcement said, would “identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.”
The link under “targeted disabilities” is now dead, but the Wayback Machine retains links from June 2017 and January 2021 that show the page was unchanged during Trump’s tenure. The list included:
- Hearing (total deafness in both ears)
- Vision (Blind)
- Missing Extremities
- Partial Paralysis
- Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy
- Severe intellectual disability
- Psychiatric disability
- Dwarfism
... Trump claimed that he had changed Obama’s criteria for hiring air traffic controllers with greater diversity — when in fact he left it unchanged. Moreover, he decried the fact that FAA hired controllers with a range of disabilities that he listed at the news conference. But that program was launched during his first term.
1 comment:
Crashes in the air, hunger stalks the land, fires burn thousands of homes. People die on the streets. Now is not the time to dismantle the federal government, now is the time for wise leadership seeking to heal the community. It is a time for the hard truths about what really works to solve problems like hunger and pollution and what is just scamming by the rich.
A true human being thrust into leadership would know how to lead to heal, to console and to vow that going forward will be better for all. A strong leader would not blame others for the chaos he has sown just by lying and trying to show he is strong. Many a time the US has seen a weak character president evolve and grow into the role, and make no mistake it is a role, a sacred trust for the American people no matter how their ancestors got here. Unfortunately the incumbent seems totally incapable of learning and growing, and being a narcissist, he just does not care what harm he causes. He daily demonstrates that his biggest weakness is his inability to learn anything real about anything for which his gut reaction is directly contrary to all available information. Low information ( especially for the willfully blind) usually leads to disaster, and it takes real talent to sow as much chaos as trump does, but nothing he and his minions will do will get at the heart of what is going wrong, and therefore we shall march blindly into climate, economic, public health, and community disasters. We are going to have to pick up the pieces. The poor will continue to try to feed their children every day just as they have after all the empires that have gone before since the beginning of civilization, crashed and burned. We do know most of what it will take to ease out of the climate crisis. It is exactly the same things to do to end hunger, stop cancers, and build communities. Practice real democracy. Everyone gets a real voice in what happens to their community. Create a circular economy with no waste or pollution and healthy kids. Grow more helathy food much closer to home. Make the energy transition to clean power with all due speed. Understand that economies develop from the bottom up, functioning better when there is much less inequality than we currently have, becoming stellar when there is no poverty as every kid then gets to offer their best self to the community.
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