What the data says about Trump's DEI air crash claims

By the numbers: 78% are men, while 22% are women, per data from the U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS.

• 71% identify as non-Hispanic white.
• The data includes air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists working in air transportation or services incidental to transportation.

Driving the news: Trump on Thursday repeatedly cited DEI policies at the Federal Aviation Administration as having played a role in the crash, and blamed Democrats including Presidents Biden and Obama, for advancing inclusive workplace policies.

• Trump implicitly equated racial, gender and other forms of diversity with a lower-quality federal workforce.

Reality check: In addition to the statistics showing the opposite is true, the cause of the crash has not been determined and there's no evidence that FAA hiring policies led to a decline in aviation safety.

Zoom in: Trump signed a memo Thursday alleging that Biden's administration "egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all agencies to implement dangerous 'diversity equity and inclusion' tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with 'severe intellectual' disabilities in the FAA," according to a person familiar with the matter.

• The "disabilities" language that Trump is opposing was in FAA regulations during the entirety of his first term and first appeared around 2013, per fact-checking website Snopes.

• The American Association of People with Disabilities said on X that FAA employees with disabilities did not cause the crash.
• "It is extremely inappropriate for the President to use this tragedy to push an anti-diversity hiring agenda," the AAPD said. "Doing so makes all Americans less safe."

Go deeper: D.C. plane crash is among country's deadliest in decades