OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
2:07 PM – Friday, March 14, 2025
After a recent report alleged that a prominent “DEI activist” provided minority candidates hoping to become air traffic controllers with a means of cheating on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) entrance exam, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that he would be looking into the matter further.
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Shelton Snow of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), a former air traffic operations supervisor stationed in New York, was heard discussing the situation in a recorded 2014 audio clip that The Daily Mail was able to obtain.
“There are some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screenshot of and I am going to send that to you via email. … I am about 99.99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question,” he could be heard saying in the clip.
Additionally, a former NBCFAE member, Matthew Douglas, told the press that he knows “several people who cheated and I know several people who are controlling planes as we speak.”
“The inside info was made available in 2014 to African Americans, females, and other minority candidates – but Whites were left out of the loop to ‘minimize competition,’” the outlet noted.
“Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups,” stated Jason Riley, of the Manhattan Institute, who made the comment in 2015.
By 2014, the FAA was testing potential hires using a biographical questionnaire that included questions like “How many sports did you play in high school?” and “What has been the main reason for your failures?”
“A job questionnaire for aspiring air traffic controllers introduced by the Obama administration was designed to meet secret DEI target numbers,” the outlet continued, referencing the 2014 entry test.
Following his inauguration at the start of his second term, President Donald Trump also signed an executive memorandum “terminating a Biden Administration Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hiring policy that prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over safety and efficiency.”
Social media users quickly chimed in to comment on the re-surfacing claims.
“Open up whistleblowing and offer bounty rewards for anyone that leads to someone being fired for being affiliated with DEI. Just like how cops give money to ppl that give info that leads to arrests,” said one X user.
“In 2016 there was an internal investigation clearing everyone involved of a prosecutable event. The recording was made at a time when Obama was pushing hiring using Biographical Assessments over Cognitive Tests. There is a lawsuit, Brigida v. Buttigieg, ongoing as of 2025, alleging discriminatory hiring practices based on programs that are DEI and similar,” said another X user.
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