With no evidence and with no proof, President Donald Trump recklessly and outrageously blamed Wednesday night’s horrid mid-air collision in Washington on his all-encompassing boogeyman of diversity, equity and inclusion.

How dare he. Using a time of great sorrow and mourning with the death of all 67 people on board the commercial airliner and the Army helicopter to make this totally unsubstantiated political claim was unseemly and out of place, but it was pure Trump, so sure is he of himself.

Trump blundered forward before experts from the National Transportation Safety Board announced a careful, deliberative process to determine the cause and before the black boxes were recovered from the freezing Potomac. It was based on his “common sense.” More like nonsense, and destructive nonsense at that.

His spineless vice president and defense secretary then echoed Trump’s garbage.

Thank goodness that the public can rely on the NTSB’s seasoned, nonpartisan specialists working for the government, a government that Trump wants to chop away at.

Something like a full-fledged NTSB investigation is not a ceremonial step or needless bureaucratic activity. They will not jump to conclusions to assign blame, but will discern exactly what went wrong and how that could potentially be avoided in the future, a painstaking process of which there’s no substitute, and certainly not the sweeping and frankly discriminatory next-day analysis of a president with no particular insight or knowledge.

The video player is currently playing an ad. We understand why upset voters can get around to supporting the idea of slashing federal programs and funding in concept. Of course there are bloated programs and pointless expenditures, and frankly much of the work that the federal government does, other than direct services and benefits, goes by unnoticed. But this is also what the federal government does — it provides controllers to monitor and coordinate flight traffic so planes don’t crash, and it inspects and adjusts when incidents do occur.

Americans have gotten used to an air travel and freight system where planes very seldom crash. We’ve also gotten used to trusting that, for the most part, the food available in our grocery stores will be pathogen-free, that consumer products won’t be hazardously defective, that drugs on the market won’t hurt or kill us, that there will be new vaccines for the next flu season, that we’ll keep making progress towards cures for cancer, that financial institutions won’t openly defraud us and on and on.

None of this is something that magically happens; it’s a scheme painstakingly constructed over decades of trial and error and managed by millions of dedicated federal employees across, yes, imperfect and sometimes profligate agencies and departments. We, unlike the president, can’t even pretend to guess at this moment what systems failed to cause this tragedy. But we know enough now to be concerned about the impact of this administration’s decisions on Americans’ safety going forward, ranging from flight safety to consumer products.

Trump has offered federal employees voluntary buyouts; leave your job now and continue to receive full pay and benefits until Sept. 30. That could reduce the headcount and costs, but it can’t undermine the work of the agencies and departments.

For all the public skepticism of the federal bureaucracy, we will sorely miss it as it withers.

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