The FAA purged its system of thousands of previously-qualified, ready-to-hire applicants simply because they did not fit the right biographical profile.

It should come as no surprise that the Obama-era FAA hiring program engineered to favor racial minorities backfired miserably. Here’s the incredible irony—as a result of the Obama administration’s reckless decision, even some qualified minorities became collateral damage and lost out on job opportunities. That’s right: The FAA’s decision to abandon merit-based hiring of air traffic controllers (ATCs) actually ended up also discriminating against some highly qualified minorities!

The FAA’s new hiring regime abandoned the CTI program as a basis for hiring new controllers, and instead based hiring on a “biographical questionnaire” designed to screen out candidates who weren’t members of a preferred minority racial group. As a result, thousands of qualified and highly-trained applicants, many of whom had spent years in school and had accumulated significant debt to pay for their educations, were turned away. Meanwhile, off-the-street candidates who passed the biographical questionnaire were given preference instead. Andrew Brigida, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, was one of several thousand CTI program participants who suffered discrimination because they did not fit the FAA’s new preferred ethnic profile as determined by the biographical questionnaire.