Fact check: Trump's FAA used the same language about hiring people with disabilities he's now blasting

Daniel Dale, CNN

Excerpts:

The Trump-era FAA had the same language on its website: The FAA’s language encouraging the hiring of people with disabilities, including intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, was featured on the agency’s website throughout Trump’s first presidency and at least as far back as 2013, as the fact-check website Snopes has previously reported. You can click here for the version of the web page captured by the Internet Archive in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term.

The Trump-era FAA also pushed to hire people with disabilities: The federal government passed a law in 1973 that aimed to increase federal hiring of qualified people with disabilities. Like other government agencies, the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, had pushed since at least the George W. Bush administration to increase its hiring of people with certain “targeted disabilities” that create extra barriers to employment. Those include not only intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, but also deafness, blindness, paralysis and missing extremities.

The FAA’s Aviation Safety Workforce Plan for the 2020-2029 period, issued under Trump, said the FAA’s Office of Aviation Safety would, in the 2020 fiscal year, “continue to promote and support the hiring of people with disabilities and targeted disabilities.”

Also during Trump’s first term, in 2019, the FAA announced “a pilot program to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations,” saying that “a key focus for the FAA’s Office of Civil Rights is to identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.” The FAA continued to promote the pilot program in the latter half of 2020, near the end of Trump’s first term.

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