The Biden administration’s nominee to head up the Federal Aviation Administration has an extensive history of pushing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.
Phil Washington, Biden’s nominee to head up the FAA, is the CEO of the Denver International Airport and previously served as the CEO of the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority. During his tenure as CEO of L.A. Metro, Washington pushed an aggressive DEI agenda, while allegedly engaging in discriminatory behavior himself.
Beginning in 2020, as CEO of L.A. Metro, Washington used the COVID pandemic to push for the city’s transit system to stop charging fares, saying it had a moral duty to do so despite L.A. Metro’s increasingly dire financial straits. “LA Metro has a moral obligation to pursue a fareless system and help our region recover from both a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and the devastating effects of the lack of affordability in the region,” Washington said at the time, via transportation magazine ITS International.
But even at the time, L.A. Metro was struggling to make ends meet. ITS International reported that in 2019, the system made between $250 and $300 million in fares, against an operating budget of $1.9 billion; a fares-to-cost ratio of about 13%. That rate had been declining for 20 years and would continue to decline as operating costs rose, Metro noted. But instead of increasing revenues, Washington planned to use federal grants and advertising to fill the farebox gap, claiming that public transit is “no different than other public programs funded by the public purse such as firefighting, policing and other public infrastructure that serves as a public right and common good.”
Washington touted his equity priorities in a letter to Metro staff in 2020, reacting to the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile. “The hallmark of my tenure at Metro has been ensuring equity both in the services we provide to the community and within our agency,” he wrote. “This has been evidenced by my standing up an Office of Race and Equity, advancing the Equity Platform and ensuring diversity on my senior leadership team.”