Feb 07, 2025 06:00:00

What was it really like inside the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), where diversity-focused hiring was implemented under the Obama/Biden administration?

On January 30, 2025, a small passenger plane and a helicopter collided near Washington DC, the capital of the United States, and all 67 people on board were confirmed dead. Immediately after the

accident , President Donald Trump said, 'Various reports indicate that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) actively hires people suffering from severe intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses,' and 'The Joe Biden administration has placed emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.' While he said he did not know whether the emphasis on diversity was directly related to the accident, he made remarks that hinted at such policies being a distant cause. Immediately afterwards, he signed a presidential memorandum stating, 'We will end Biden's hiring policy, which prioritizes DEI over safety and efficiency, and replace all FAA employees with those who are appropriately qualified.' Essayist Tracing Woodgrains introduced the hiring system that the FAA has established and how it has changed over the past 10 years, including stories of people who applied for FAA jobs.

The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

To become an air traffic controller in the United States, you must complete the necessary training courses and then a few more months of training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. After graduating from the FAA Academy, you will be deployed to locations around the country and undergo additional training before being certified as a professional air traffic controller.

In 1989, the FAA established the Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI), a program that allows students to complete their initial training as an air traffic controller at a university or other educational institution, in order to review the training procedures for air traffic controllers. The CTI taught the basics of being an air traffic controller, and students who completed the course were hired as entry-level controllers by recommendation and were exempt from the first five weeks of training at the FAA Academy. However, completion of the CTI program did not guarantee admission to the FAA Academy.

According to Woodgrains, completing the CTI program did not necessarily mean you would be hired as an air traffic controller, but at the time there was a trend that 'if you completed the CTI and passed the aptitude test, you would be hired,' and the students at the time were optimistic.

However, in 2014, under the Barack Obama administration, the FAA suddenly revised its hiring system, creating a new hiring route that allowed anyone with a four-year degree or five years of full-time work experience to apply to the FAA Academy. While this opened the door to making it easier for people who did not attend a university that offered a CTI program to become air traffic controllers, this measure also meant that all aptitude tests that CTI students had taken in the past were no longer valid.

Students were confused by the sudden rule change, and a 'Save CTI' group was created on Facebook. CTI alumni and students searched for any information they could to understand what was going on and waited for the selection process to begin in February 2014.

What awaited the students was something called a 'career questionnaire' that had little to do with the CTI program.

A replica of the career questionnaire is available to the public, and the contents are non-technical, such as 'Please choose your best subject from the list below' and 'What do you think is your ideal job?'. Reportedly, some questions were secretly assigned 'points,' and those who chose high-point options and earned a certain number of points were given a chance to be hired.

According to the survey , more than 28,000 people applied when the program first opened up, but only 8% of them, or about 2,200 people, passed the initial background questionnaire, and Woodgrains said 85% of students who completed the CTI program received a rejection notice.

The loosening of the requirements comes as the FAA faced pressure to diversify in the 1990s and 2000s, Woodgrains said.

According to Woodgrains, the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) was particularly influential. NBCFAE called for broadening the scope of recruitment for air traffic controllers, a profession that has historically been dominated by white men, and encouraged changes to the recruitment process to make it easier for minorities, women, and people with disabilities, who have been underrepresented in the past, to pass the exam. NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, and members of the group reportedly met with the FAA, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism, the Congressional Black Caucus, and others to urge them to increase diversity.

The change in the FAA's hiring system was widely covered in the newspapers at the time, with Fox News criticizing the FAA for discriminating against those who were qualified. Naturally, CTI students, who had invested tuition and time to acquire skills, and CTI's management were unhappy with this move, and a movement was started, led by the students at the time, calling for a review of the FAA's hiring process.

In 2016, after much activism by former students, Congress passed legislation requiring the FAA to overturn the use of background evaluations in hiring and offer affected individuals the opportunity to reapply. An FAA study found that background questionnaires were 'unreliable tests' that measured employee performance in a much smaller way than aptitude tests.

According to Woodgrains, the 2014 reforms changed the quality of applicants, resulting in a very large number of qualified people being rejected from attending the FAA Academy, and the dire staffing shortage will continue as of 2024. One air traffic controller who retired after 25 years with the FAA said, 'The ideal candidate completes their on-the-job training in about four years, but in the last few years of my retirement I saw trainees taking six to eight years.'

'The FAA has destroyed the relationships it had built with CTI officials and undermined the power of those most committed to training air traffic controllers,' Woodgrains said. Looking back on the 2025 aircraft accident, he said, 'President Trump and Vice President Vance have referred to the background questionnaire by name, reminding us of this hiring scandal.'