The Federal Aviation Administration is not a federal agency that the average person often interacts with. It’s the organization in the federal government that provides oversight for America’s skies, making sure safety standards are met, and ensuring that planes which go up also come down without injury. In other words, for anyone who flies often, or even yearly, it’s a pretty important organization.

According to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Barack Obama decided that it was more important to ‘diversify’ the FAA than it was to ensure safety. In a report, he alleged that Obama and his administration prioritized the hiring of minorities over safety at the agency. They allegedly used ‘diversity’ questionnaires to increase minority hiring because they felt the agency was “too white,” and in doing so rejected qualified and experienced applicants, putting people at risk.

In his report, Carlson said that former President Barack Obama and his administration modified the hiring process for those hoping to get a job with the government agency.

Instead of considering the work history of an individual, or their criminal history, or even whether or not they have the skills needed to do the job, the previous administration created, and enforced the use of a ‘biographical questionnaire.’

This ‘questionnaire’ was the first step in the application process. If the person was not ‘diverse’ enough, they were told that they could not even apply for the job.

This information became public thanks to the efforts of Michael Pearson, an attorney representing a man who is currently suing the FAA over its use of its ‘diversity test.’

According to Pearson’s claims, and the claims made by his client, the test was designed entirely to weed out people with experience, particularly those who had prior aviation experience.

In other words, the test was designed to weed out the people who would be most well-suited for jobs with a federal organization which oversees aviation, aviators, and aircraft regulations.

Fox News managed to get a copy of the test, and the sheet which explained how to properly score said test. Candidates whose worst subjects in high school were science, and candidates who were unemployed, were given the highest scores by the test.

Meanwhile, people with extensive knowledge of air traffic control systems and practices and licensed pilots were scored lower, and viewed as ‘less desirable’ candidates.

When the news agency spoke to an FAA spokesperson, they said they were unsure of the purpose of the diversity screening, and never managed to offer an explanation for it.

Pearson, however, had a theory for why the test might have come into use, and the reason was just as egregious as the questionnaire itself.

According to the lawyer, a group within the FAA, which included the ‘human resources’ arm of the federal agency and the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees, simply decided that the agency was “too white” for their liking.

To solve that, they pushed for the Department of Transportation under the Obama administration to become ‘more diverse,’ rather than being better at their jobs.

Pearson, who spent nearly 27 years of his life working as an air traffic controller in four of the busiest airports in the nation, pointed out that there is no data that ‘diversity’ hiring would make the skies any safer.

He also stated that the new diversity hiring policies seemed to be the fault of groups like the leftist National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a public-sector union which controls a large political action committee.

In recent years, the FAA has been the source of a few scandals, including when they threatened to declare states that would not allow the Transportation Security Administration to run their airport’s security as ‘no-fly’ zones, effectively barring such states from being able to operate aircraft legally.

However, it seems that this particular scandal may be much worse than their threats. The idea that the federal government would put the safety of people traveling the skies in the hands of unqualified people in order to score race-bating brownie points is horrible.

So is the idea that the FAA could somehow take people who had no history or applicable experience and train them better than people who went to school to become pilots, aeronautical engineers, or air traffic controllers.

Barack Obama was obsessed with ‘diversity’ hiring. It seems that his administration bowed to pressure from a number of organizations that were more interested in being ‘diverse’ than they were in being safe, and this choice could very well put everyone in the country at risk. Moreover, it didn’t help black unemployment, Trump did that by using a ‘magic wand’ to bring back jobs that ‘were never coming back.’

Hopefully, the FAA will ignore NATCA, and will use the Pearson lawsuit as an opportunity to set sane policies that hire the most qualified candidates, regardless of their race, skin color, or even their gender.

Otherwise, a future left-leaning president could use the DOT to make these kinds of ridiculous policies permanent.