Air-traffic controllers are far too important to Americans’ safety to be subjected to unconstitutional race-based hiring in the name of “diversity.” It’s a shame the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t see it that way.
In fact, the Obama administration is throwing out basic competency tests in hiring air-traffic controllers so they can diversify the field — and put us all at risk.
Take the case of Andrew Brigida. Born and raised in Mahopac, a hamlet 30 miles north of Manhattan, Brigida’s family moved to Arizona, where he attended Arizona State University. He signed up for the university’s air-traffic-controller major. In May 2013, he earned two aviation-related B.S. degrees and took the demanding, eight-hour computer-based Air Traffic Selection and Training
exam; he scored 100 percent.
ASU sent his name to the FAA with a recommendation that he be hired.
Then he waited. And waited. In late January 2014, he received an e-mail. “Dear Applicant,” it read, “The [FAA] is implementing changes to improve and streamline the selection of [air-traffic controllers]. Your standing in our current applicant inventory is being impacted by these changes.
“Specifically, the current applicant inventories, including your application, are in the process of being closed and will no longer be utilized . . . Any prior application that you submitted will no longer be considered.”
In other words, his test scores — once good for three years — were invalid and he was at the back of the line. He wasn’t alone; 2,000 to 3,000 other highly qualified applicants got that news and had their names “purged” by the FAA. Late last year, as the lead plaintiff in a federal class-action lawsuit, he sued the FAA and other Obama administration agencies and officials.
Representing him is Mountain States Legal Foundation of Denver, which won the landmark Supreme Court ruling Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (“In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, concurring), and of which I am president. Attorney Michael Pearson, a former air-traffic controller from Phoenix, serves as local counsel where the case was filed in federal district court.
The FAA didn’t just dump Brigida and his fellow applicants; it also abandoned a decades-old, rigorous hiring process. Beginning in 1995, the feds collaborated with universities and colleges to create accredited degree programs, such as the one at ASU where Brigida graduated. Thereafter, the FAA gave a hiring preference to veterans, those with CTI program degrees, references from administrators, and high test scores.
The change came after an all-but-unnoticed announcement by President Obama’s new FAA head Michael Huerta, in May 2013, of his intent to “transform” the agency “into a more diverse” workplace.
That was accompanied by a suspect analysis that purported to show women and minorities as “underrepresented.”
In December 2013, the FAA began its new hiring process, discarded its long use of the difficult cognitive-assessment test, and implemented instead a new, unmonitored, take-home personality test — a Biographical Questionnaire.
Among other questions, it asked: “The number of high school sports I participated in was?” “How would you describe your ideal job?” “What has been the major cause of your failures?” “More classmates would remember me as humble or dominant?”
Apparently it still didn’t get the desired results; Fox News reported FAA officials helped selected applicants cheat. The FAA not only tossed aside its preference for trained and qualified air-traffic controllers, it also opened the position to “off the street hires,” any English-speaking citizen with a high-school diploma.
That the agency responsible for maintaining the safety of thousands of aircraft that transverse the United States each day, not to mention the millions of Americans on-board, would abandon a time-tested procedure for hiring the nation’s best and brightest in the name of diversity is shocking, but not surprising, given the administration’s obsession with race.
But violating the constitutional and civil rights of Americans in the name of diversity should be a bridge too far even for Obama.
William Perry Pendley, an attorney, is president of Mountain States Legal Foundation.