Without evidence, President Trump and other administration officials claimed that DEI programs led to Wednesday’s fatal air crash. DEI has recently become a common talking point to blame disasters on.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
So the investigation into what caused this fatal air collision is just beginning, but almost immediately, President Trump and other administration officials said diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the Federal Aviation Administration were to blame. Trump also acknowledged he had no direct evidence that DEI had anything to do with the crash. This is not the first time opponents of DEI efforts have tried to tie DEI to a disaster, and I want to bring in NPR’s Lisa Hagen to discuss why. Hi, Lisa.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: You have done some reporting about how DEI has become a sort of catchall explanation for disasters, for tragedies. What else has been blamed on DEI?
HAGEN: Yeah. Most recently, supporters of Trump’s blamed the spread of wildfires in Los Angeles on DEI efforts at the LA Fire Department. We heard it as a critique of the Secret Service after assassination attempts on candidate Trump. We heard it after the Baltimore bridge collapse last spring, and that list goes on.
KELLY: Well, and it’s interesting because in a lot of these cases, the facts are not known right away. Investigations require time. Why the seeming rush to tie DEI?
HAGEN: Yeah. I spoke with Ian Haney Lopez about this. He’s a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of the book “Dog Whistle Politics.” He says invoking DEI in this way is part of a larger effort to trigger resentment against groups that have been historically marginalized.
IAN HANEY LOPEZ: But to do so in terms that do not embrace a blatant, direct bigotry, but that instead seek to clothe themselves in some form of a commitment to fairness or excellence.
HAGEN: He says blaming DEI is shorthand for a story that America used to be based only on competence and meritocracy, which – that’s an inversion of our actual history of pervasive discrimination against people other than straight, white men.
KELLY: Back to this press conference today with President Trump. He seemed to be reading from the actual DEI inclusion policy, the actual diversity and equity inclusion policy at the FAA. What do we know about what it says about hiring practices there?
HAGEN: Yeah. So it’s important to say those hiring practices were also in place under all of Trump’s first administration. But here’s another important thing. I spoke with a former FAA official today who wanted to remain anonymous because of retribution concerns. But that official pointed out, air traffic control is a very specific job within the FAA, and those specialists go through very rigorous skills testing and a psychological evaluation before they’re hired.
KELLY: Just to step back, this second Trump administration has aggressively been trying to end DEI programs across the federal government, across the military. Can you just put into context, remind people what it is they’re trying to get rid of, how DEI is supposed to work in practice.
HAGEN: So according to people who do DEI counsel – consulting, these efforts are trying to push workplaces toward meritocracy. It’s things like standardizing hiring and promotion processes or writing scoring rubrics for candidates where often there weren’t any before. And you often hear anti-DEI activists saying it’s about hiring quotas, but those are actually illegal in the United States.
KELLY: That is NPR’s Lisa Hagen. Thanks very much.
HAGEN: Thank you.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
