There is a sense of nervousness in the air after recent plane crashes across the country and many are questioning if hiring standards could be to blame.
An attorney at the forefront of a historic lawsuit shared some discoveries from court on a recent episode of Liz Collin Reports.
Grady Block is an attorney with Mountain States Legal Foundation. The lawsuit goes back a decade and was filed on behalf of a group of air traffic controller applicants.
Block explained his involvement: “We represent a group of about a thousand plaintiffs in this class action against the FAA. They are people who went to college, went through collegiate training initiatives, everything they were supposed to do. All of them passed with flying colors. A lot of them passed with … a hundred percent across the board.”
What matters most: qualifications or DEI?
Despite their qualifications, Block said, “the Obama-Biden administration looked at, looked at the hiring class and said, ‘You know, this looks a little bit too white for what we want. We want to expand DEI initiatives.’”
“So they got rid of the CTI program, which was the collegiate training initiative, and they switched the entire thing to a new questionnaire that was based on biographical information, and it was designed to effectively gerrymander out the white people from the hiring class. So we asserted Title VII claims against them, and you know, like you mentioned, it was quite a long time ago. This was 10 years ago in 2015 when we filed the suit. And so we’ve been litigating ever since then,” Block explained.
“This is something that should have been fixed, well it should have never been a problem, but it should have been fixed from the outset and you know the problem has only gotten worse when you’re excluding people from the hiring class,” he added.
The Trump administration is aware
Vice President JD Vance brought up the lawsuit after the recent tragedy at Reagan National Airport.
“I think it’s a mix of emotions. There are some people that are happy that there are eyeballs on the situation now that people are actually aware of this issue … a lot of people had no idea that there’s a massive understaffing at the FAA for air traffic controllers and it leads to incredibly dangerous situations … some people are still just very frustrated. These people went to college, spent tons of money to try to become air traffic controllers and then to have the entire carpet just yanked out from under them. It’s a really sad situation,” Block said of his clients.
Block also noted, “There are about 14,000 air traffic controllers in the country and they excluded a class of a thousand so that problem is just gonna exacerbate and what’s unfortunate is you can’t just wave a wand to just fill those positions, you know. And with that is gonna come very dangerous like the one we saw at Reagan … It’s really unfortunate but it is definitely the situation we find ourselves in.”
“We’re in a lot friendlier administration now than we were two months ago. I’m very hopeful that what will happen next is that President Trump will hopefully order the DOJ to one, stop asserting bogus privileges over the 14,000 documents so we can continue. But even better, ideally he orders us to settle the case. We can move on and get back to hiring based on merit instead of just somebody’s race,” he added.
