A coalition of eleven Republican attorneys general submitted a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday, warning the federal agency that prioritizing DEI in the hiring process could put airline passengers at risk.
“We are troubled by some recent reports regarding your agency’s hiring practices and priorities,” wrote Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, who led the four-page letter. “It seems that the FAA has placed ‘diversity’ bean counting over safety and expertise, and we worry that such misordered priorities could be catastrophic for American travelers.”
The letter, addressed to FAA administrator Michael Whitaker, claims that the airline-transportation agency “appears to prioritize virtue-signaling ‘diversity’ efforts over aviation expertise” under the Biden administration. “This calls into question the agency’s commitment to safety,” it reads.
As evidence of the agency’s deemphasis of merit-based hiring, the letter cites the FAA’s “five-year strategic plan,” which states that the “FAA will diversify its workforce by rethinking its hiring practices and capitalize on opportunities to hire people who will bring new and diverse skills to the agency and reflect the demographics of the U.S. labor force.”
The Obama administration followed a similar hiring practice, when the FAA “sought out applicants with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities to staff the agency responsible for air traffic control, aviation safety, major airports, commercial space regulation, and security and hazardous materials safety,” the letter states.
Moreover, the FAA has been using race-based assessments to screen employment applicants and has been circulating race-related buzzwords to help minority candidates rise to the top of the list.
During its “Year of Inclusion,” in 2023, the agency held a three-day Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility symposium that included training on “Understanding the Impact of DEIA,” “Overcoming Biases Using Exponential Mindsets,” and “Unmasking Unconscious Bias.” Notably, the symposium ended on the same day that the Supreme Court struck down the affirmative action embedded in the admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
“The FAA undertook these efforts even though it has acknowledged for more than a decade that ‘[t]here is a trade-off between diversity . . . and predicted job performance/outcomes,'” the letter adds.
The FAA faced several problems last year when agency officials were focusing more on DEI than safety, Kobach noted. Last January, for example, thousands of flights across the U.S. were delayed because of a critical system failure. Even more alarmingly, the number of near collisions involving commercial airlines more than doubled over the past decade.
More than 2.9 million airline passengers take 45,000 flights per day, according to the FAA. With these numbers in mind, Kobach told the agency that “failure is not an option.”
“Given the recent FAA failure that delayed thousands of flights last January and the recent spike in near aircraft collisions, we are very worried that the FAA has lost sight of its primary goal – ensuring the safety of American skies,” Kobach said in a statement on Wednesday. “American lives depend on the FAA hiring the most-qualified aviation experts.”
The Republican attorneys general who joined Kobach in signing the letter include Steve Marshall of Alabama, Treg Taylor of Alaska, Tim Griffin of Arkansas, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, Todd Rokita of Indiana, Brenna Bird of Iowa, Lynn Fitch of Mississippi, Andrew Bailey of Missouri, Austin Knudsen of Montana, and Ken Paxton of Texas.
National Review received no response from the FAA Press Office.