On the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Vice President JD Vance defended President Trump’s claim that DEI policies were to blame for the tragic fatal aircraft collision over the Potomac River on Wednesday.
Trump has been criticized for making the assertion without evidence and saying “common sense” led him to his conclusion.
In video she shared in advance of the show’s airing, Bartiromo asked Vance: “So do you have any evidence that any of those hires that were there at the control Wednesday night were DEI hires?”
Vance replied that there is a chance that the person at the controls was not a DEI hire and added: “But let’s just say that 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: “There is a very direct connection between policies of the last administration and short-staffed air traffic controllers. That has to stop.”
The Vice President added: “That is a scandal. Thankfully, it’s a scandal the President has stopped.”
Join us for my exclusive tomorrow w @VP @SundayFutures @FoxNews 10am et + #live w @LeeMZeldin @SenJohnBarrasso @RealTomHoman pic.twitter.com/WTrvaHhe35
— Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) February 1, 2025
NOTE: The current shortage of air traffic controllers did not start during the Biden administration. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a labor union and aviation safety organization, has warned about staffing shortages for more than a decade.
In 2023, the FAA commissioned a safety review and discovered that in addition to a shortage of air-traffic controllers, outdated equipment and technology was “rendering the current level of safety unsustainable.” Yet funding for air traffic services has “essentially remained flat for the last five years.”
According to the report, the air traffic controller staffing problem is a result of a number of factors spanning four decades and notes “a surge in hiring occurred during several years following the air traffic controller strike in 1981. That, in turn, led to a wave of retirements from 2005-2007. To adequately compensate for these losses, new hires, trainees, and ultimately fully certified air traffic controllers needed to already be in the training pipeline.”
Note: It can take years to train an air traffic controller; at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the site of the crash last week, training takes nearly 16 months.
The FAA report also noted that government shutdowns — in 2013 (which lasted 16 days during the Obama administration) and the 2018-2019 (which lasted 35 days during the first Trump administration) — suspended hiring and training for months. The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 also paused hiring and training for almost a year.