The Admin’s Addressing the Air Traffic Controller Shortage by Hiring People Who’ve Never Lost a Round of Fortnite

Welcome back to Barf Bag. 

If ever you thought stinky basement trolls with questionable Twitch subscription diets, perpetual Cheeto-crusted hands, and every possible iteration of Call of Duty didn’t have a future in air traffic control, think again. Per Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, the administration’s program to hire gamers en masse to fulfill a shortage of air traffic controllers has been a whopping success! Toasting celebrations with some Jet Pilot cocktails.

“GAME CHANGER,” Duffy tweeted last weekend, along with a 56-second video combining video-game graphics, clips of him on Fox News, and interviews with gamers that took up the post. “You can merge gaming with aviation, why not?” one guy says. (Why not, indeed.) The 56-second video mixes Fortnite clips with what appears to be air traffic simulations and—reassuringly—soundtracks in an ever-crescendoing remix of “Heads Will Roll.” 

🚨 GAME CHANGER

In April, we launched a NEW CAMPAIGN to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers — and supercharged the entire hiring process to get the BEST & BRIGHTEST in faster. The results are HISTORIC ✈️

✅ 94% of hiring goal met — fastest time ever to reach target… pic.twitter.com/gN3OGmEIBB

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) August 9, 2026

 

“In April, we launched a NEW CAMPAIGN to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers — and supercharged the entire hiring process to get the BEST & BRIGHTEST in faster,” Duffy wrote in his caption. “The results are HISTORIC.” He added at least 2,000 gamers have been hired, and that they’ve reached “the Academy quicker than any class before them, thanks to the most streamlined hiring process.” Nice! 

Of course, all this back-patting ignores the fact that the aviation industry’s recruitment crisis jolted up in the first place after the administration fired hundreds of employees from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in February 2025, as part of a—you guessed it—anti-DEI push. 

When Duffy first rolled out his gamer-to-traffic-controller pipeline idea, he said his reasoning was “to reach the next generation of air traffic controllers,” because “This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.” Silly me, I never knew that my background playing League of Legends (don’t be mean) qualifies me also for field work. That is, if the darned War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could so believe it.

But speaking to the Independent at the time, former FAA official Michael O’Donnell expressed concern of Duffy’s decision, saying while gamers would, indeed, come in with a “skill set,” those skills can’t “replace aptitude, or discipline, or decision making under pressure.” Welp. We’ll see, I guess.

More barf:

• Kristi Noem was immortalized into a lifesized statue of herself and a horse in South Dakota. Because one of her, apparently, wasn’t enough. [NBC News]
• Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Sec. John Kennedy (R-La.) called Democratic socialists “Lulu Lenins.” [Mediaite]
• Air Force One is full of “boxes and boxes of McDonald’s,” Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. revealed on a podcast. Yum. [YouTube/Net Positive with John Crist]
• The White House compiled and gifted State Secretary Marco Rubio a “Rubio realizing” meme-collage. Great. They’ve killed my favorite Marco joke. [@MarcACaputo/Twitter]
• Hegseth unveiled a new motto for the Shield of the Americas aka the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition aka the A Triple C: “WE DO BAD THINGS TO BAD PEOPLE.” [@DOWResponse/Twitter]