Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.

Only the bad ones. The good ones have less downtime than a regular person. Random dudes you work with probably golf more than most presidents do.

"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"

Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.

Any federal law enforcement position has this. For example, for the FBI or the secret service, you must enter by 37 and retire by 56.

If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36.

Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.

So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.

Edited to add documentation: https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_asses...

https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/1981-patco-strike

Their ability to collectively bargain effectively. It doesn’t matter how good their current compensation is - they aren’t getting the fair market rate without the ability to bargain as a union. Its an example of government and corporate interests colluding to suppress labor wages.

https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits

Median pay is $127,805 and by law the salary is capped at $221,900. Training salary starts at under $67,000 in the Bay Area and is much lower elsewhere. They can't strike and are actively being outsourced. Look up the KSQL controller on youtube to see how well that's going.

the president has entire staffs, including highly qualified generals, bureaucrats, line workers, etc. to drive the ship.

That's a silly argument.

Airline pilots have a mandatory retirement age based on health and safety studies associated with the risks and requirements of flying a plane.

Girl scout age requirements, as you might imagine, aren't based on the same criteria.

It's measurable biological certainty that reaction times as measured in milliseconds and fine motor control degrade with age. Vision and hearing also degrade. The nature of hands on control of flying a plane means there are no ways to compensate for this.

None of this applies to a politician making decision in a time span of hours, days or months and who can delegate tasks as they wish.

But I think the argument is still valid for other reasons.

Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?

I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.