Don’t Blame DEI for the American Airlines Crash
With an astonishing lack of grace, President Donald Trump has suggested that the recent collision of a military helicopter and an American Airlines jet near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was caused by diversity hiring at the Department of Transportation during the Biden administration. Sean Duffy, the new secretary of transportation, agreed that “when we deal with safety, we can only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety.”
Duffy, who was sworn in the day before the crash, is responsible for ensuring the safety of our highways, railroads, and aircrafts, with final say over regulations issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Yet Duffy, a Fox News commentator, former congressman, and reality show contestant, has no experience in the transportation sector.
The press conference at which Trump and Duffy made these remarks was, of course, no place for scoring political points. But, more importantly, the subtle attack on the Biden administration was ill-founded. The safety agencies in the Department of Transportation under Pete Buttigieg worked hard to undo damage to the regulatory agencies done under the first Trump administration, as well as issuing many regulations and orders that made our airways, highways, and railways safer.
For example, under the Biden administration, the Federal Aviation Administration launched an aggressive oversight program for Boeing and its suppliers that put more FAA inspectors on factory floors and conducted more safety audits. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wrote regulations requiring all passenger cars and light trucks to have automatic emergency braking technology by September 2029.
The Federal Railroad Administration issued a regulation requiring freight trains to have at least two crew members in the cab of the locomotive on the grounds that, like airplane pilots, the engineers operating three-mile-long freight trains—that could be transporting toxic or explosive chemicals—should have someone on board to take over in case the engineer became incapacitated.
In stark contrast, during the first Trump administration the Department of Transportation worked ceaselessly to remove transportation safety requirements. After a tragic incident on a Southwest airlines flight in 2018 where a fan blade in the Boeing 737 engine separated and blew out a window killing a passenger, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general found that the Federal Aviation Agency office responsible for inspecting the plane had routinely allowed Southwest “to fly aircraft with unresolved safety concerns.” The problem, according to the inspector general’s report, was that the agency under President Trump had not succeeded in “navigating the balance between industry collaboration and managing safety risk.”
That was not the only failure of the Trump administration to enhance transportation safety. An Obama-administration proposal to require speed-limiting devices on 18-wheeler trucks died during the Trump administration because the agencies could not come up with two safety rules to repeal—a stipulation of a foolish executive order requiring federal agencies to repeal two regulations for every regulation they issued. Indeed, the Trump Administration repealed important safety regulations issued during the Obama administration. For example, the Federal Railroad Administration repealed regulations requiring “bomb trains” containing flammable liquids to install electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on every tank car.
There is every reason to believe that the Department of Transportation in the second Trump administration will pursue the same deregulatory agenda. As a candidate, President Trump promised to issue an order requiring federal agencies to repeal ten regulations for every new one. As he implements the administration’s deregulation agenda, Secretary Duffy will not have to worry about being called out by the department’s inspector general, because the inspector general was fired by President Trump weeks ago.
Secretary Duffy will find it difficult to hire the “best and the brightest” civil servants under a new Schedule F executive order that takes away civil service job protections. And Elon Musk’s determination to drastically reduce the size of federal work force on President Trump’s behalf will greatly increase the risk of future transportation disasters: The early evidence indicates that at least one cause of the crash was understaffing at the control tower, where one air traffic controller was doing the job of two controllers.
Instead of attempting to score political points with his base, President Trump should honor the victims of the crash with a promise that he and his appointees will not interfere with the efforts of dedicated civil servants to improve transportation safety.
Thomas O. McGarity is a professor of law at the University of Texas. His book, Demolition Agenda, recounts the efforts of the first Trump administration to whittle away regulatory protections.
