The chairman of the House’s Aviation Safety Caucus is accusing the former Biden administration of helping fuel the current air traffic control (ATC) crisis, by its choice to fund progressive diversity initiatives instead of modernizing the aging system.
Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., told Fox News Digital that the former administration’s marquee bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was among several “missed opportunities” to fund a revamp of the ATC system.
“That was before I came to Congress, but, you know, you had just mistaken priorities in that, all this DEI policy, DEI staffing, that all got baked into the cake,” Langworthy said. “They could have taken that money and spent it on real modernization of what is critical infrastructure in this country.”
“We had the longest period of incident-free aviation in this country’s history, where we didn’t have a commercial air crash from the time the crash happened in Buffalo, in my district, back in 2009, to just this year, and what happened at [Ronald Reagan Airport]. And it was avoidable,” he said.
It comes after a blackout at Newark Liberty International Airport reportedly caused a roughly 90-second outage to its air traffic control screens.
And earlier this year, a military helicopter collided with a passenger plane coming from Wichita, Kansas, in a deadly incident just off the shores of the nation’s capital.
Langworthy clarified that he does not believe DEI policies “necessarily” directly hit ATC.
“It’s what they spent the money [on]. I mean, you know, there’s infrastructure projects, ones in my backyard, where they want to bury and tunnel over our main artery in the town because it’s going to reunite a community somehow,” he said.
Hellbound and Down 