President Donald Trump called for Congress to pass a new air traffic control system during the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday following last week’s deadly plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) were both in attendance at the bipartisan event as Trump called for the new legislation.
“We should have had better equipment. We don’t. We have obsolete equipment. They were understaffed for whatever reason,” Trump told the audience. “I guess the helicopter was high and we’ll find out exactly what happened.”
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“The odds of that happening are extremely small,” Trump added. “It’s like, did you ever see, you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours. I never see a ball hit another ball.”
Last week, Trump spent the immediate hours after the deadliest U.S. plane crash in decades railing against past DEI policies at the Federal Aviation Administration, implying the federal government wasn’t recruiting the best and brightest to patrol the skies. Pressed what made him confident that diversity policies were a factor in the crash, Trump called it “common sense.”
The president on Thursday blamed the collision of the American Airlines Flight 5342 arriving from Wichita, Kansas, and an Army Black Hawk Sikorsky H-60 on “a lot of mistakes made” before claiming it would lead to better legislation to prevent another crash.
“I think what is going to happen is we’re all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers,” Trump said. “Brand new, not pierced-together, obsolete … trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system.”
“We spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate the whole broken system, instead of just saying, cut it loose and let’s spend less money and build a great system, done by two or three companies, very good company specialists,” Trump continued.
The president then implored congressional leaders, including Johnson, Thune, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to pass “a single bill where we get the best control system.”
This week, the FAA announced it was restricting helicopter traffic over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport until March 31.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also announced on X that he had communicated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team “to help upgrade our aviation system” on Wednesday.
Trump spent part of the rest of his remarks at the prayer breakfast touting the importance of religion, praising the late evangelical minister Billy Graham, and bragging about the bipartisan confirmation of some of his Cabinet members.
The president also attended a second prayer breakfast at the Washington Hilton hotel where he continued his pro-religion remarks.
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“I will be creating a brand-new presidential commission on religious liberty. It’s going to be a very big deal,” Trump said, according to a White House pool report.
Trump also said he would sign an executive order ordering the recently confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi “to eradicate anti-Christian bias” inside the federal government and would create a faith office in the White House led by the Rev. Paula White.