The Trump administration is looking to tap a seemingly untouched resource: video game-playing adults.
A federal agency put out a call on Friday using a video that literally starts like an Xbox game.
‘It’s not a game. It’s a career.’
After a series of short video-game clips, text on the screen asks, “Are you up for the challenge?”
“You’ve been training for this,” it continues, building suspense, before a gamer sitting in front of his computer screens is transported into his new career: ensuring that passenger planes take off and land safely and without incident.
“Become an air traffic controller,” the ad says, with a club remix of the 2009 Yeah Yeah Yeahs hit “Heads Will Roll” playing in the background.
“It’s not a game,” the upbeat recruitment spot declares. “It’s a career.”
The 70-second video told prospective applicants that not only would they keep “millions of people safe” every day, but they would “make a lot of money” doing so.
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Per the ad, gamers making the jump to an air traffic controller career could look forward to an “average salary” of “$155,000 per year after 3 years.”
Air traffic controller was just one of the roles at the Department of Transportation and FAA that was revealed to be sorely out of touch when President Trump took office for his second term in 2025.
Last year, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reported that a near hour-long grounding of planes could be linked to “incredibly old technology” that utilized floppy discs and copper wires.
Earlier in 2025, documents about FAA hiring practices showed that the federal agency had been specifically looking to hire people with disabilities, which included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
This appears to be a stark contrast to the Transportation Department under Duffy, who once called the department’s systems “not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.”
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Luke Hales/Getty Images
Last September, Duffy met his goal to recruit at least 2,000 new air traffic controllers by bringing in 2,026. This was coupled with a stated goal of hiring at least 8,900 new air traffic controllers through 2028.
“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” Duffy said about the ad targeting gamers. “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,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
According to a 2025 audit from the Office of Inspector General, the FAA employs about 13,000 traffic controllers in over 300 facilities across the U.S. Nearly 10,600 of those are “certified professional controllers.”
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