What Project 2025 Actually Says About Your Flight and Why it Matters Now

The government is hiring gamers to run the sky.

Not metaphorically. Not as a recruitment gimmick that some intern cooked up and nobody approved. The Department of Transportation put out an ad on April 10, 2026 that opens on an Xbox logo, cuts into Twitch stream footage, cuts into towers and runways and aircraft, and tells you to level up. The application window opened at midnight on April 17. Twelve thousand people applied in less than two days. Sean Duffy, the man running transportation in this country, called it wildly successful. By August 2026 the FAA and Duffy are saying the campaign got them to 94 percent of their hiring goal for the year.

Now here is what I need y’all to sit with, because the internet is going to spend the next two weeks arguing about whether gamers can do the job, and that argument is a decoy.

The question is not whether a person who plays Fortnite can be trained to separate aircraft. The question is what happened to the standard. Because for a hundred years in this country, every time a Black person walked up to aviation and asked to be let in, this government produced a study, a questionnaire, a psychological profile, a temperament assessment, a business necessity, a passenger comfort concern, an operational burden. Something. Anything. The bar was never a fixed height. The bar was a valve, and the valve had a hand on it, and the hand knew exactly who was standing at the door.

Then the labor market got tight. Then the retirements outpaced the hires. Then the shutdown broke the pipeline. Then, all of a sudden, the same government that spent January 2025 telling America that Black people and disabled people had been let into aviation without merit stood up in April 2026 and said we are recruiting from Twitch.

That is not a contradiction. That is the mechanism working exactly as designed.

This means the people who told you it was about merit are wrong, and they proved it themselves, on camera, in an ad set to electric music.

Start where the argument starts, because the argument did not start with Sean Duffy.

On November 10, 1925, the Army War College produced a memorandum for the Chief of Staff titled The Employment of Negro Man Power in War. It was not a slur shouted from a porch. It was a staffed, sourced, institutional document, and it concluded that Black men had smaller brains, lacked physical courage, panicked under combat conditions, and were constitutionally incapable of operating anything as technical as an aircraft. One line held that the negro is a rank coward in the dark, that his fear of the unknown and unseen would prevent him from ever operating as an individual scout with success.

That memo was the qualification standard. That memo is why the Army Air Corps was closed. Not a hunch. Not a personal prejudice. A finding.

The NAACP fought it. The Black press fought it. Black organizations fought it for sixteen years, and in January 1941 a Howard University student named Yancey Williams, who already had a civilian pilot’s license and an engineering degree, sued the War Department to force it to accept him. Roosevelt overruled his own generals one day later and ordered a segregated flight training program at Tuskegee Institute. Between 1941 and 1945 Tuskegee trained 994 aviators. Four hundred forty five deployed. Sixty six were killed in action. Thirty two were shot down and taken prisoner.

Notice the sequence, because the sequence is the whole thing. The finding came first. The exclusion came second. The lawsuit came third. The war came fourth. And it was the war, the manpower need, the shortage, that moved the valve. Not new science about Black brains. Nobody at the War College published a retraction in 1941 saying we recalculated the skull data. The country just needed pilots.

They didn’t discover we could fly. They ran out of white men.

Eight years earlier, Bessie Coleman had already made the point without waiting for anybody’s permission. No American flight school would train a Black woman in 1920, so she learned French, went to France, and came back on June 15, 1921 with an international license issued by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. The skill was never in question. The gate was.

Twenty two years after Tuskegee, Marlon Green applied to be a pilot at Continental Air Lines.

Green was born in El Dorado, Arkansas in 1929, son of a domestic worker. He flew for the Air Force. He logged more than 3,000 hours in multiengine aircraft, including B 26s. In 1957 he started applying to commercial carriers because the reporting said the airlines were finally going to hire Black pilots. Continental rejected him. He filed with the Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission, which held hearings and found that Continental had rejected him solely because of his race, and ordered the airline to put him in its next training class.

Continental fought it for six years. All the way up.

And I want y’all to hear the argument the airline made in front of the United States Supreme Court, because this is the part they leave out of the Black History Month post. Continental did not argue that Marlon Green couldn’t fly. They could not argue that. The man had three thousand hours in a bomber. Continental argued that having a Black pilot on board would be burdensome. That passengers might be upset. That they would not be able to find hotels for a Black pilot laying over in the segregated parts of the country.

Read that again. The barrier was not his qualification. The barrier was other people’s comfort, dressed up in the language of operational necessity.

On April 22, 1963, in Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, 372 U.S. 714, Justice Black delivered the opinion of the Court and the state commission’s order was reinstated. Continental hired Green in 1964. He flew for them from 1965 to 1978. He made captain in 1966. He later told Smithsonian Magazine that he could not remember a single incident dramatic enough to be memorable, that not one passenger and not one fellow pilot ever refused to fly with him.

Fourteen years of flying. Zero incidents. Six years of litigation to get in the door. He also told Smithsonian that the fight took a lot of life out of him and his family.

That is the accounting nobody puts in the ledger. The valve does not just delay you. It charges you.

Now let me get to the actual reason there is a shortage, because Duffy will tell you it is the pandemic and Trump will tell you it is DEI and both of them are pointing at the smoke.

On August 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike. On August 5, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life. PATCO had endorsed him in 1980. That did not save them.

The FAA has never structurally recovered from that. Everything you are watching right now grows out of that root. The union that exists today, NATCA, was built out of the workforce that replaced the strikers, and it was founded on a pledge never to strike. The staffing cliffs, the training bottlenecks, the fatigue, the sixty hour weeks, the six day schedules, the mandatory overtime, the retirement waves that come in bunches because the hiring came in bunches, all of it traces back to a single afternoon when this government decided that mass firing a technical workforce was an acceptable price for breaking a union.

Then the shutdowns. The 43 day shutdown that ran into November 2025 had controllers working without pay, retirements tripling, and the FAA ordering flight cuts at around forty major airports, starting near four percent with a plan to escalate to ten. Thousands of flights cancelled. Nearly a quarter of flights arriving late into sixteen of the busiest airports in the week after controllers missed their first check.

So when the transportation secretary tells you the answer is Twitch, understand what question he is answering. He is not answering how do we build a durable workforce. He is answering how do I fill 2,200 slots this fiscal year without touching the labor arrangement, the funding structure, or the forty five year old wound underneath it.

Here is where it gets sick, and here is where the right wing case falls apart on its own evidence.

Before 2014, the FAA hired most of its controllers out of the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative. You went to a partner school, you did the coursework, you took the AT SAT aptitude test, and if you passed you went on a qualified applicant register. In 2013 the FAA convened a Barrier Analysis and then paused CTI hiring, and in February 2014 it replaced the front of the process with a biographical questionnaire. Roughly 4,000 CTI graduates took it. Fewer than 14 percent passed. The thing was reportedly designed so that 90 percent or more of applicants would fail. It was unproctored. You could take it at home.

Andrew Brigida scored a perfect 100 on the AT SAT and failed the questionnaire. Matthew Douglas Cook, who is Native American, scored a perfect 100 on the AT SAT and failed the questionnaire. They sued. In February 2022 Judge Friedrich certified a class of non African American CTI graduates who had passed the aptitude test and been screened out by the questionnaire.

Now watch what the right does with this, and watch what actually happened.

Congress banned the practice in 2016. Public Law 114 190 prohibited the use of biographical assessments as a first line hiring tool for air traffic controllers. That is nine years before the Potomac. The thing they blamed for January 29, 2025 was made illegal in 2016.

And here is the part that never makes the Fox chyron. That questionnaire hurt Black CTI graduates too. Black students who had put in the years and the tuition and the debt at a CTI school and passed the aptitude test also got purged when the register got wiped, because the tool was not a preference, it was a shredder, and a shredder does not read your face before it eats your paper. The plaintiffs’ own filings note that some qualified minority candidates got caught in it. Mountain States Legal Foundation says it out loud on their own case page.

Two things can be true. The 2014 process was a bad, unvalidated, indefensible instrument that hurt thousands of people who did everything right. And the story that instrument became, the story that a diversity push handed the tower to unqualified Black people, is a lie that a decade of receipts does not support and that the actual controller demographics laugh at. Roughly 71 percent of the people in this occupation are white. Around 8 to 9 percent are Black. About one in five is a woman, and that number has barely moved since the 1980s.

You cannot flood a workforce and simultaneously not be in it.

Sixty seven people died over the Potomac when an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk collided on approach to Reagan National.

The next morning, before the NTSB had anything, the President of the United States stood in the briefing room and read a headline about the FAA hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities and said, and they can be air traffic controllers, I don’t think so. He said a group within the FAA determined the workforce was too white. He said they actually came out with a directive saying it’s too white. The Vice President said controllers were not being hired because of the color of their skin. Sean Duffy stood at the same podium and said we will not accept excuses, we will not accept passing the buck.

The FAA’s disability hiring language had been on its website since 2013. It sat there through Trump’s entire first term. In 2019, under Trump, the FAA expanded the effort and announced a program to hire twenty people with disabilities as controllers. The 2023 report on it states that participants must meet the same qualifications as any other applicant. When a reporter put that to him directly, the President said he changed the Obama policy and then Biden changed it back.

Meanwhile the preliminary reporting on the actual tower that actual night indicated staffing was not normal, and that one controller was working both the commercial traffic and the helicopter, a configuration that FAA staffing practice does not contemplate.

The controller was not too Black. The controller was too alone.

Fifteen months later that same administration is running Fortnite footage under a federal job posting that says no prior air traffic experience is required.

Every accusation is a confession. They told you the standard had been lowered. They were describing what they were about to do.

Let me lay the campaign out clean, because I want people to be precise when they argue about this.

The FAA is not hiring 2,000 gamers. The FAA is hiring 2,200 controller trainees in fiscal 2026, 2,300 in 2027, 2,400 in 2028, and it is using a gaming themed recruitment campaign to fill the applicant pool. It ran a version of this in 2021 too, also called Level Up, also aimed at eighteen to thirty year olds. The 2026 version launched April 10. Applications opened April 17 and closed at 8,000 submissions. They got over 12,000 in under two days. Duffy has said that when the incoming administration polled about 250 academy graduates before the 2024 election, only three of them said they were not gamers.

The job posting says no prior air traffic experience is required. The Department notes that only about 25 percent of controllers hold a traditional college degree and that around 65 percent of Americans regularly play video games. Average salary after the academy and on the job training runs about $155,000.

Here is what they do not put in the ad.

You have to be a United States citizen. You have to be under 31 years old. You have to pass a federal background check, a medical exam, a drug test, a psychological evaluation, and a three and a half hour cognitive assessment. Then you go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, which means you relocate on a trainee salary, and then you go to a facility for on the job training that can run two to five years depending on complexity. About two percent of applicants make it all the way through to certification.

Two percent. So the ad is not a lowering of the standard. The ad is a marketing funnel poured into a bottleneck that has been broken for four decades.

And that is the thing that should actually make you mad. They did not open the door. They just put a louder sign on it.

André Brock Jr. wrote Distributed Blackness in 2020, and the argument that matters for us is this: the default user is white, not because anybody wrote that down, but because every interface, every ad, every research design, and every marketing deck imagines a body before it imagines a behavior. Brock’s whole method, what he calls critical technocultural discourse analysis, is built to make that unstated body visible. He is not saying Black people are absent from the internet. He is saying the opposite, that Black digital practice is enormous and generative and constantly misread, precisely because the category of user was drawn around somebody else first.

Apply Brock to the word gamer.

Sixty five percent of Americans play video games. Black Americans play at rates at or above the national average. By any behavioral definition, gamer is one of the least white categories in American life. But gamer as a cultural identity, gamer as the thing the ad is invoking when it opens on an Xbox logo and cuts to Twitch, is not a behavioral category. It is a demographic picture with a headset on. That picture has a race and a gender before it has a skill.

Which is why the same political coalition can hold two positions that should be impossible to hold at once. It can say that hiring outreach aimed at Black candidates is an unacceptable dilution of merit, and say that hiring outreach aimed at gamers is innovative talent identification. There is no reconciliation available on the merits, because merit was never doing the work. The picture was doing the work.

Brock lets us say the quiet thing precisely. The problem was never that outreach existed. The problem was who the outreach was pointed at. When the arrow points at us, they call it a lowered standard. When the arrow points at them, they call it untapped talent.

And this is where I want to be honest in a way the dunk tweets won’t be. Recruiting gamers could genuinely reach Black applicants. It should. If the FAA wanted to build the Blackest applicant pool in its history it could not design a better funnel than Twitch and Discord and Fortnite. So watch what happens next. Watch the demographics of the 2026 and 2027 academy classes. Because if that pool comes back looking like America and the certification rate for Black trainees comes back looking like it always has, then the ad was never the bottleneck, and everybody who told you the ad was the story owes you an explanation.

Brock’s point is not that the recruitment is racist. Brock’s point is that we should stop pretending the category is neutral. Naming who the picture is drawn around is how you keep the receipts.

May 15, 2026. Two months before the 94 percent victory lap.

The FAA released its 2026 to 2028 Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan and quietly reset the definition of full staffing. The old forecast said the system needed 14,633 Certified Professional Controllers. The new plan says the system needs 12,563. That is roughly 2,070 positions erased on paper in a single Friday afternoon press release. The agency said the new number was based on forecast demand and a Transportation Research Board review. Administrator Bryan Bedford said we can’t continue to operate the same way and expect better results. The plan talks about modern staffing models, automated scheduling tools, reviewing facility hours of operation, and increasing the time controllers actually spend plugged in and moving traffic.

NATCA said it was not involved in developing the plan, that it was reviewing the document, and that it believes the revised model rests on faulty research that understates the real shortage and dumps the difference onto the people already burning out on six day weeks.

Now put the two announcements next to each other.

In May they lowered the target by about 2,000. In August they announced they had hit 94 percent of the goal.

That is not a hiring achievement. That is a redefinition wearing a hiring achievement’s jacket.

Same move as 1941. Same move as 2014. Same move as January 2025. The number is not a measurement of what safety requires. The number is a dial, and somebody’s hand is on it, and the hand turns it toward whatever the political moment needs it to say.

The qualification was never a thermometer. The qualification was always a valve.

I told y’all on camera I was writing the piece on what Project 2025 actually says about aviation and privatizing transportation. Here it is.

The Department of Transportation chapter of Mandate for Leadership was written by Diana Furchtgott Roth. Around page 633 the document lays out separating the Air Traffic Organization from the FAA and from the department’s oversight, and around page 632 it moves aviation research and development responsibility toward private companies. Senate Democrats’ own August 2024 summary flagged both. Chapter 5, the Homeland Security chapter written by Ken Cuccinelli, states that until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.

Deunionized immediately. Write that down.

Now here is the receipt that turns this from a 2023 document into a live program. On December 4, 2025, three weeks after the longest shutdown in American history ended, Diana Furchtgott Roth published a commentary at Heritage titled How to Modernize America’s Air Traffic Control. Her argument, in her own framing: if the ATO were private, as in Canada, or a public private partnership as in parts of Western Europe, then payments would not be disrupted by shutdowns. She proposes user fees flowing directly to the ATO. She proposes that there could be multiple air traffic control providers as long as they met government performance standards. She lists four steps: separate the FAA from DOT or at minimum separate the ATO from the FAA, overhaul the funding model by privatization if possible, require the FAA to operate more like a business, and authorize the ATO to issue long term revenue bonds. She writes that the only reason America has a fully public system is union pressure and fear of job loss.

Understand the play. You do not privatize a functioning system. Nobody sells you a fire extinguisher while the house is fine. You need the crisis first. The shutdown produced the crisis, and three weeks later the author of the Project 2025 transportation chapter used the crisis as the argument for the thing the chapter already wanted.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a byline and a date.

To be precise, because precision is the point: the administration publicly stepped back from a privatization fight in August 2025, saying a governance battle would delay the urgent work of hiring and modernizing. The Senate Appropriations bill for fiscal 2026, S.2465, contains language barring any funds from being used to plan, design, or implement the privatization or separation of the FAA’s air traffic organization functions. NBAA, NATCA, and the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists all signed a joint letter opposing privatization in December 2025. In May 2026 the FAA actually took two towers back from private contractors.

So the wall is holding. For now. The wall is holding because a Senate appropriations rider and a coalition of aviation unions are standing on it, and appropriations riders expire every single year.

Which brings me back to the transcript. My man said this is an indictment of capitalism, that you prioritize profits so much you are willing to deprioritize the safety of constituents and consumers to make sure private entities get paid. Let me sharpen that rather than repeat it. The indictment is not that somebody wants efficiency. The indictment is the sequence. Break the funding mechanism through a shutdown. Point at the resulting failure. Offer the market as the cure for a wound the state inflicted on purpose. Then staff the interim with the cheapest available labor pool and call it innovation.

Two roles frame. What Sean Duffy says he is doing is solving a staffing emergency. What the position structurally does is keep an underfunded, understaffed, contract frozen public workforce limping along just well enough to avoid a reckoning, and just badly enough that when somebody finally says let the private sector run it, the public will be tired enough to say fine.

I am not ending on the diagnosis, because Afropessimism is descriptive, not prescriptive, and description is not a place to live.

In 2002 Alondra Nelson edited the Afrofuturism issue of Social Text and took apart the digital divide discourse that was choking Black technology conversation at the time. That discourse held that Black people were behind, that we were the analog remainder in a digital future, that the problem was our deficit and the solution was catching us up. Nelson’s intervention was to point out that this framing required ignoring an enormous archive of Black technological practice, invention, and speculation in order to work. The divide was real as an access story. It was a lie as an identity story. And the identity story was doing most of the political work.

Apply Nelson to right now.

They want you to argue about whether Black kids can read while a federal ad campaign recruits from the exact spaces Black kids have been building culture in for twenty years. Both halves of that are a deficit story, and neither half is true the way it is being told. Black players did not fall behind gaming. Black players built the vernacular, the streams, the tournament culture, the memes, the entire aesthetic register that ad was stealing from when it cut to Twitch. Black aviators did not fall behind aviation. Bessie Coleman had an international license in 1921 while American schools were still refusing to enroll her. Marlon Green had three thousand bomber hours while Continental was in court arguing about hotel rooms.

The deficit was never in us. The deficit was in the door.

So when they tell you the standard had to be lowered to let us in, you tell them the standard was never a standard, it was a valve, and the only thing that ever changed it was pressure. Yancey Williams filed suit and the valve moved. Marlon Green litigated for six years and the valve moved. A war came and the valve moved. A shortage came and the valve moved.

It has never once moved because somebody at the top had a revelation about our capacity.

Which means the entire history of this thing is proof that they knew. The whole time. They knew, and the finding was the cover story, and the cover story got a footnote and a letterhead.

Watch the academy classes. Fiscal 2026 and 2027. Who applies, who gets seated in Oklahoma City, who certifies. If the pool diversifies and the certification rate does not, the bottleneck was never recruitment and everybody who sold you the ad as the story was selling.

Fight the count, not just the cut. The most dangerous thing in this whole story is not the Fortnite footage. It is that the statistical capacity to evaluate any of it got dismantled in 2025 and the forms that would let you see Black women at all are being rescinded in 2026. A country that stops counting is a country preparing an argument it does not want checked.

Watch the rider. Every appropriations cycle, S.2465’s privatization ban has to be renewed. That single sentence is currently the only thing standing between the Project 2025 transportation chapter and the tower.

And put your money and your mouth where the reading is. The kids in the ad are not the villains. They are the ones who got handed a controller because the country closed the library, and now the country is calling that a career pathway and taking a bow.

See, Brock reminds us that the word gamer was never neutral, that a picture of a body was drawn before a description of a skill was ever written, and that whoever holds the pen on that picture holds the door. And Thomas teaches us that a child’s imagination is not a private matter, that a nation funds the worlds it wants its children to inhabit and starves the rest, and that you can trace exactly what a country believes about a child by looking at which room it sent them to and which room it sent the money to.

1. The bar is not a measurement, it is a valve. From the 1925 Army War College memo through the 2014 biographical questionnaire to the 2026 Twitch campaign, the qualification standard for American aviation has moved with labor demand and political pressure, never with new evidence about anybody’s capacity.

2. They erased the shortage on paper before they announced they had solved it. On May 15, 2026 the FAA cut its full staffing target from 14,633 certified controllers to 12,563. In August it announced 94 percent of the hiring goal met. NATCA says it was excluded from building the new model.

3. The thing they blamed for the Potomac was banned in 2016. Public Law 114 190 prohibited biographical assessments as a first line hiring tool nine years before the January 2025 collision, and that assessment screened out qualified Black CTI graduates too.

4. The money did not disappear, the capacity did. Title I and the civil rights office came out level funded for fiscal 2026, but roughly $900 million in education research contracts got cancelled, the statistical agency got gutted, and adult literacy programs got shifted toward the Department of Labor.

5. The privatization argument is on a byline with a date. The author of the Project 2025 transportation chapter published a Heritage commentary on December 4, 2025, three weeks after the longest shutdown in history ended, using that shutdown as the case for separating and privatizing the Air Traffic Organization.

I don’t have a network behind me. No corporate desk, no institution, no editor telling me which receipts are too spicy for the advertisers. What I have is y’all. I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, academic frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers. If everybody reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise.

• Army War College. Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: The Employment of Negro Man Power in War. November 10, 1925.

• Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, Inc., 372 U.S. 714 (1963).

• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Marlon Green,” editorial feature, February 2023, and the Black Wings exhibition.

• Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Marlon DeWitt Green (1929 to 2009).”

• PBS. “Who Are the Tuskegee Airmen?” January 28, 2022.

• Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971), on artificial credential barriers and business necessity.

• Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Department of Transportation chapter (Furchtgott Roth), approx. pp. 628 to 638; Department of Homeland Security chapter (Cuccinelli), ch. 5.

• U.S. Senate Democrats. “How Project 2025 will harm America’s transportation infrastructure,” August 2024.

• Furchtgott Roth, Diana. “How to Modernize America’s Air Traffic Control.” Heritage Foundation commentary, December 4, 2025, originally in The National Interest.

• AOPA. “Senate ATC modernization funding bill blocks privatization,” July 30, 2025, on S.2465.

• NBAA. “ATC Modernization, Not Privatization,” including the December 3, 2025 joint letter with NATCA and PASS.

• GAO 25 107917, December 2024, finding 51 of 138 FAA systems unsustainable.

• Brock, André, Jr. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. NYU Press, 2020.

• Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. NYU Press, 2019.

• Gray, Kishonna L. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. LSU Press, 2020.

• Gray, Kishonna L. Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live. Anderson, 2014.

• Nelson, Alondra, ed. “Afrofuturism.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002).