Jan 30: The Potomac River Collision
Gitmo for migrants; HHS NGO funding freeze, Big Pharma Vs. RFK Jr.
The Big Story
An American Eagle passenger jet carrying 64 people collided with a Black Hawk military helicopter while approaching the runway at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac River, leaving no survivors.
The last time a commercial airliner crashed in the United States was in 2009, when a Continental Airlines Flight out of Newark, New Jersey, stalled while attempting to land in Buffalo, New York. That crash, which an investigation determined was due to pilot error, led to a wave of new regulations about the minimum number of flight hours pilots and first officers were required to log before they could fly with commercial passengers.
We do not know the cause of the crash over the Potomac yet, though early evidence suggests that the military helicopter—flown by two experienced pilots on a training mission, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—mistakenly drifted into the descent path of the jet. Voice recordings from air-traffic control (ATC) show that the controllers asked the helicopter pilots to confirm they had the jet in sight, which they did, but it seems likely that had actually identified another jet departing from a different runway. The Black Hawk also appears to have been out of place—according to an Army warrant officer quoted by Fox’s Jennifer Griffin, the normal flight ceiling for military helicopters on the Potomac route is 200 feet, but the crash appears to have taken place at 350 feet. More generally, DCA has some of the most crowded airspace in the country, and The New York Times reports that the control tower was understaffed last night, with one controller simultaneously responsible for communicating with the helicopters and directing airplane arrivals and departures, jobs that would normally be divided between two people. Add to that a complicated approach, a last-minute runway change for the approaching jet, and the helicopter crew’s reliance on visual confirmation, at night, at low elevation, when aircraft lights can easily blend into ground lights, and it becomes easier to see how a mistake could have occurred.
Speaking in the White House press briefing room this morning, President Trump expressed his condolences to the loved ones of those lost to the crash. He then shifted his speech toward the possible causes. While he admitted it was too early to make a definitive statement, he did opine about the possibility that DEI might have had something to do with the tragedy, and touted his attempts to increase standards in ATC hiring. “I put safety first,” said Trump. “Obama and Biden put policy first.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added that he believed the crash was, indeed, “preventable, absolutely.”
Trump’s comments have provoked outrage, and it should be noted that as of now, there is no evidence tying DEI policies to the crash—at least not directly. But as The Scroll reported in January and February of last year, DEI policies implemented by the Obama administration did contribute to a well-documented staffing shortage and morale problems among ATCs and at the Federal Aviation Administration, which have led to several near-misses over the past several years. In a series of 2023 investigations, for instance, The New York Times described a frightening pattern of safety lapses due to errors from ATCs, some of whom were reported for showing up to work drunk and/or high.
As we noted at the time, and as subsequent investigation from X user @TracingWoodgrains confirmed, the FAA under Obama had revolutionized its hiring practices in a bid to increase diversity among the nation’s ATCs. In 2014, it scrapped a standardized test that measured air-traffic controllers’ applied mathematics and spatial reasoning skills and replaced it with a “biographical assessment” that was explicitly designed to “purge” the applicant pool of the disproportionately white graduates of the Air-Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI), previously one of the main sources of new ATC employees. The biographical assessment instead awarded points based on proxies for race, including a recent history of unemployment, low grades in high-school science, and participation in high-school sports.
The biographical assessment was theoretically banned by Congress in 2016 and discontinued in 2018, but as writer Patrick Casey notes on X, it’s unclear whether the ban actually took hold in any meaningful sense. The law directed the FAA to hire roughly half of its applicants via “off the street” (OTS) hiring, which had represented a negligible portion of ATC hires prior to the 2014 change. According to a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Transportation, the FAA was, as of 2019, still using the biographical assessment for OTS hires, and in 2023, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) sponsored a provision in the FAA Reauthorization Act to eliminate the use of the biographical assessment—suggesting that it was still in use in some form.
The result of these changes, as this chart from a 2023 report from the National Airspace System Safety Review Team showed, was a sustained decline in ATC hiring:
The Biden administration did, to its credit, make an aggressive push to hire more ATCs during its last two years in office, including by attempting to revive the CTI pipeline. But if Trump may have been hasty in blaming DEI, it’s also hard to argue that these experiments in social engineering have been making American aviation safer, regardless of the causes of this specific crash.
The Rest
→In a new executive order signed Wednesday, President Trump directed the federal government to repurpose Guantanamo Bay to house up to 30,000 criminal migrants. In a press conference yesterday, Trump admitted that using Gitmo for the housing of criminal migrants is a difficult move. “It’s a tough place to get out of,” he said. That such a measure had to be taken at all is an “unforced error,” according to Trump, likely in reference to the disastrous immigration policies of the Biden administration. He considers the measure to be a last resort to detain the overflow of criminal migrants while policies are implemented to secure the southern border. Predictably, leftists across social media are outraged and have already started calling migrant Gitmo a “concentration camp.” The Fifth Amendment might protect noncitizens in criminal proceedings, but it does not shield them from immigration-related consequences, according to the law firm Stechschulte Nell. On Wednesday Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, the bill named after the young woman murdered in 2024 by an illegal migrant, which grants his administration the power to detain migrants who have been arrested for or charged with certain crimes.
→In what is likely to be read as joyous news by readers of The Scroll, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that the department has frozen all grant funding to nonprofits outside of government control, which she said in an interview with Fox News has been “perverted into a shadow government” that, among other things, feeds illegal immigration. She accused many of the NGOs of having infrastructure and operations set up in Mexico, aiding and abetting those who seek to violate U.S. law. Given that the NGO apparatus around the Democratic Party is vital to how it maintains its grip on power—“regimented by political operatives and NGO organizers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations meant to overcome historical American notions of equality” is how Tablet literary editor David Samuels described the top-down Democratic Party structure in this UnHerd article last year—Noem’s announcement can be interpreted as an assault on the Democratic Party itself.
→X user A Midwestern Doctor, a writer who covers health-care corruption for a Substack, points out that the antagonism of the various senators toward Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was almost directly proportional to the amount of money each had taken from Big Pharma. Using OpenSecrets to track donors, AMD found that three of the senators who questioned Kennedy the hardest were some of the top recipients of donor money from pharmaceutical firms. Bernie Sanders, who took $1,953,613 from pharma over his career, hit Kennedy with his catchphrase, “Do you regard health care as a human right?” Kennedy said he didn’t. Inalienable rights like free speech, he said, don’t come at any financial cost. The strangest showdown at the hearing came during Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s questioning. Warren cited Kennedy’s association with the law firm Wisner Braun, according to which Kennedy allegedly gets paid to sign people up to be plaintiffs in the firm’s lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. She seemed to be implying that Kennedy had a financial incentive to influence anti-vaccine lawsuits as health secretary, but Kennedy called her out for her own motives. “You’re asking me to not sue vaccine companies,” he said, to which Warren screamed (literally screamed), “No, I’m not!” Warren has received more than $1.7 million in Big Pharma donations over her senatorial career.
→President Trump’s Department of Justice opened talks Wednesday between New York Mayor Eric Adams’ legal team and Manhattan federal prosecutors to get the corruption charges against Adams dropped, the New York Post reports. At the Tablet offices we’ve been speculating about the possibility of Trump intervening in Adams’ blatantly politically motivated corruption case, and it seems now that Adams’ cozying up to the president may be working in his favor. We’ve suspected the corruption charges against Adams filed in September to be a bit bogus even before we knew exactly what they were. In a September essay for Tablet, Liel Leibovitz wrote that being the New York mayor requires one to have connections to the neighborhoods and the people in those neighborhoods who get stuff done in a relationship of mutual back-scratching vital to the city’s functioning. “Prosecuting New York City mayors for their proximity to their corruption is like prosecuting bartenders for their proximity to gin,” wrote Leibovitz.
Those charges turned out to be related to an alleged $100,000 bribe that Adams took from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help expedite the opening of the new Turkish consulate, which was built to house the country’s diplomats in proximity to the United Nations. In an interview with Tucker Carlson (but never mind that), Adams clarified the situation with Turkey, saying he only helped expedite getting the building a permit and told the Turkish leadership to manage their expectations if he couldn’t get it done. So why indict Adams over something that seems so trivial? Well, Adams speculated on that same show that his going public with his dismay about the Biden administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge the migrant crisis in New York might have made him subject to the Democratic Party’s political retribution. Given the similarities between what’s happening to Adams and what happened to Trump in the Manhattan courts, it makes some sense that Trump would take an interest in helping the mayor out.
→In the first major display of the agency’s force in New York since Trump took office, says The New York Times, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 39 illegal immigrants on Wednesday. Most of those arrested have been arrested for or convicted for major crimes or are believed to be associated with gangs or drugs and/or arms trafficking. A major operation with 29 teams, many with officers from various federal agencies, and the coordination of Mayor Eric Adams and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the number of arrests made was higher than ICE’s average number of daily arrears over the past two years. Frank Tarentino, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York office and one of the federal agents involved in the raids, said he hopes to keep up this volume of arrests in the weeks ahead. Tarentino said that among the arrests he witnessed was that of a man from the Dominican Republic who was wanted by Interpol for a double homicide. He was captured in Washington Heights. Another man arrested in the Bronx was brought in on an arrest warrant he had in Colorado for his involvement with Tren de Aragua, the violent Venezuelan gang that made national headlines last year for its occupation of several apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. Ten suspected members of the same gang were arrested in Queens yesterday, charged with a drug and arms trafficking conspiracy, according to NBC News, after an investigation unrelated to the ICE raids. A Mexican who had been charged with three counts of sexual assault was picked up in the Bronx.
→According to a report by The Times of Israel, one of the four female IDF soldiers released by Hamas in exchange for 200 Palestinians last weekend, Liri Albag, is a bona fide hero who a former hostage released in 2023 says personally saved her life. Amit Soussana shared on Channel 12’s Uvda investigative program Tuesday that Albag convinced Hamas captors that Soussana was not an IDF officer. Soussana claimed that her captors bound her arms and legs together, beat her with a stick, and threatened her with a sharp metal object, demanding she admit to being in the military, claiming they learned from TV that she was. With a gun to her head, Albag was told by the Hamas captors that she had 40 minutes to tell them the truth or die, but she managed to persuade them that Soussana was not IDF. “First real story of leadership among the hostages,” says our senior policy analyst.
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The defenestration of the NGO network, though admittedly just in its earliest stages, is some the best news one could ever hope to hear.
They are responsible for so much evil and destruction it is impossible to quantify.
The only cherry on that sundae would be seeing some of those people responsible for organizing, funding and orchestrating their heinous activities prosecuted for their crimes.
Trump connecting crash to possible DEI is unhelpful and non uniting. Unnecessary by him to opine this way. Families don’t need this idea in their heads. Not every event needs to be tied to the DEI or immigration boogie man. I say it’s insulting to my intelligence and yours to do so.