DEI IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND HAS INFLUENCED FEDERAL HIRING DECISIONS, INCLUDING AT THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION, FOR YEARS
INTRODUCTION AND BACKSTORY
There is no question that when George Floyd died from the combined effects of years of drug abuse and the reckless negligence of a stunted cop who didn’t put him in the recovery position, administer Narcan, or immediately summon an ambulance, we lost our way. The race hustlers saw an opening, and the political winds would favor, in the short term, any narrative that put us in a time machine and took us back to the Jim Crow South. BLM raised millions, and the attack on police and law and order led to the condonation of crime and the election of District Attorneys who elevated an illusory sense of “social justice” over public safety. “Defund the police” was a rallying cry, and suddenly an audience was created for nonsensical pseudo social science such as “White Fragility,” which sold millions of copies. “White Privilege” sang from the rooftops. Scared to death, corporate stooges joined issue and suddenly decided that the order of the day was to incorporate “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” into hiring and promotion. Universities suddenly created a bureaucracy of “DEI officers,” and the assault on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was in full strength. “White privilege” was part of school curriculum, and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, whose intellectual bona fides I personally question, pronounced, “…the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” This asshat, who wallowed in millions in Biden-era grants, stated, “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” Marxist, anyone? This darling of the left found his way BY NAME into the Code of Federal Regulations attached to the Department of Education, and this nonsense was slated to become curriculum. “Equity” became the mandatory narrative and spawned a new era of discriminatory practices of governments and businesses at all levels. This rebuke of a color-blind America and blatant disregard for the Constitution as well as Title VII and Title VI became enshrined in the Biden administration and had its birth during Obama’s. Suddenly, race and “sex” became everything, and we had been treated to a Biden Cabinet reeking with virtue signaling miasma, giving us everything from a pup play Department of Energy official to a moron Vice President and everything in between. Cue the 2024 election. We had enough. Fast forward to a recent tragedy and the reigniting of the divisive issue of discriminatory practices in hiring, especially in safety-critical areas like medicine and, yes, air travel.
THE TRAGEDY IN WASHINGTON LIKELY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH DEI BUT THE ISSUE HAD HOVERED OVER THE FAA FOR YEARS
Many of us were disappointed over President Trump’s assertion immediately after the January 29th tragedy at Reagan Washington National Airport, and during grim recovery efforts, to broadly blame “DEI” for the collision and the deaths of scores of innocent souls. It is true that only two days after his inauguration, the President signed an Executive Order entitled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation” aimed at removing discriminatory hiring practices in the FAA and the aviation industry writ large, stating:
“Illegal and discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring, including on the basis of race, sex, disability, or any other criteria other than the safety of airline passengers and overall job excellence, competency, and qualification, harms all Americans, who deserve to fly with confidence…”
This did not come out of the ether but is the result of equity-based “thumb on the scale” hiring practices in the FAA that started in the Obama Administration, were briefly halted by Congress, in part, in 2018 during Trump’s first term, and reinstituted by Biden and Buttigieg in 2021. In fact, Pete Buttigieg, the underqualified Transportation Secretary who had the right virtue signaling resume for Biden’s Cabinet, had been Mayor of an undersized city in Indiana but no credentials for such a role, became a defendant in a case that is very instructive on the practices that set the FAA years behind. Read on.
THE CASE OF BRIGIDA V. BUTTIGEIG 538 F. SUPP 3d 12 (2021) TELLS A TROUBLING DEI TALE
In May of 2021, United States District Judge Dabney Friedrich considered a case wherein two potential Air Traffic Controller Specialists (ATCS) Andrew Brigida and Matthew Douglas Cook, Caucasian and Native American males, respectively, failed to be hired as Air Traffic Controller Specialists after graduating from an FAA-established Air Traffic–Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) and both scoring 100% on the FAA Air Traffic Control Selection and Training examination. The programs had created a substantial inventory of eligible and highly qualified candidates from a pool that was composed of military veterans, the general public, and AT-CTI candidates like the plaintiffs. Good to go, right? Wrong. Obama happened. In evaluating the plaintiff’s Complaint, the Judge noted the following, which would be taken as true for that stage of the proceedings:
“Allegedly in response to outside pressure, over the course of 2012 and 2013 the FAA conducted a barrier analysis for the ATCS positions to determine whether the existing hiring processes served to discourage hiring minority applicants…. The report determined that only 5% of the CTI pool compared to an average of 34% of African American representation across the non-CTI applicant sources. In response to this analysis, the FAA implemented several changes to its hiring process for air traffic controllers, eliminating CTI-only vacancy announcements, creating a new testing and evaluation process, and ending its consideration of prior applicants in the FAA’s inventory of eligible applicants.”
Let this sink in. A highly qualified pool of applicants from a targeted collegiate program and who scored high on the required testing were eliminated from contention because a “barrier analysis” ordered by the Obama White House determined that not enough African Americans were in the CTI program, and apparently there was not enough African American representation overall in a job with, as the Judge put it, “zero margin for error.” In considering the plaintiff’s claims of Title VII and Fourteenth Amendment discriminatory animus, the Court further noted:
“Here, the Complaint alleges more than the mere withdrawal of a preference. Instead, the allegations describe the FAA’s decision to abolish, for allegedly discriminatory purposes, a purportedly race-neutral application process that the FAA designed and implemented… these allegations mirror those in cases that have found Title VII violations where an application process was redesigned to change the racial composition of the successful applicant pool…”
The case was allowed to proceed and was certified as a class action with thousands of alleged victims of Obama era DEI added and will go to trial later this year. Hopefully the Trump DOJ will select from the plaintiffs those highly qualified applicants and hire them. Unfortunately, these allegations date back to 2015, and many would need to start all over. Unconstitutional, unlawful, and shameful.
IN FEBRUARY OF 2024 ELEVEN REPUBLICAN ATTORNEYS GENERAL SUBMITTED A LETTER TO THE FAA HEAD BECAUSE BIDEN DOUBLED DOWN ON LUNACY
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach led the charge, writing that:
“…We are troubled by some recent reports regarding your agency’s hiring practices and priorities… 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, who reported to Buttigieg, also cited the Obama-era race-based tampering with merit-based objectives and the Biden Administration’s 2023 “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” symposium, which actually championed a thinly disguised race quota program to have the FAA’s employee roster mirror the “demographics of the U.S. labor force.”. The symposium was right out of “White Fragility,” Robin DiAngelo’s monetization of race using false assumptions (you know, the idiot who gave Matt Walsh a guilt donation in “Am I a Racist?”) or any of Dr. Kendi’s Marxist drivel and had subgroups focusing on “Unmasking Unconscious Bias” and “Understanding the Impact of DEI.”. It was considered a plus to also include the hiring of people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. Perfect for handling the highest-stress jobs in the world. The symposium ironically took place the same time the Supreme Court invalidated identical practices in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina as unconstitutional. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023).
The letter and its concerns fell on deaf ears.
CONCLUSION
Justice Antonin Scalia, in issuing a concurring opinion in a case wherein the Supreme Court found that the City of New Haven, Connecticut, had violated Title VII in failing to certify the test results for the ranks of Captain and Lieutenant in the Fire Department because too many whites passed it, said the following:
“…the Federal Government is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race… it is also prohibited from enacting laws mandating that third parties—employers, whether private, state, or municipal—discriminate on the basis of race… Title VII’s disparate impact provisions place a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies and to make decisions based on and because of those racial outcomes. That type of racial decision-making is… discriminatory…”
In an environment where there is literally zero margin for error, the imposition of race and gender-based considerations in what must be a race and gender-neutral hiring scheme of the best and the brightest is political pandering of the worst kind. Obama was a smooth operator who flew under the radar in his discriminatory objectives and cost the FAA years to advance a racial agenda when race should have nothing to do with who could best juggle the stresses of air traffic control and the safety of millions of souls. Biden made it worse and was right out in the open with institutional bias in hiring. Trump, his ill-timed statement notwithstanding, gets it right and has finally, by Executive Action, mandated that only race-neutral criteria will be utilized in the hiring process for safety-critical positions. It is about time. May those innocents who lost their lives on January 29th find the peace they deserve, and may their survivors heal and seek the redress they deserve.
Mike Imprevento
February 3rd, 2025