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In so many cases, there is a bipartisan agreement: The Federal Aviation Administration is in trouble. After years of excellent safety, the U.S. air travel system has been plagued by near-missing mistakes recently, in a horrible situation, crashing. The Air Traffic Control Tower is understaffed, and the controller is now lost twice - 90 seconds and 30 to 90 seconds respectively, which can track the ability of flights entering and leaving Newark.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained on CNBC yesterday: "Someone should have seen this."
In fact, a lot of people saw it coming. Regulators, pilots, controllers, airline executives and outside observers have warned for years that the system lags behind and runs outdated technology. However, the successive presidential administration and Congress have taken no action, falling into a false sense of stability in the absence of deadly commercial airline crashes in the United States. The struggle of the gas security regime is especially intrinsic – news reports are as compelling as aircraft crashes, with many starting with nervous flyers, but the FAA is much like much of the federal government: long-running well-run, but years of ignorance and insufficient funds quietly drive its hard collapse.
The idea that FAA can run in a cheap way is an old and lasting idea. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan broke the strike of air traffic controllers, demanding more favorable working conditions, shooting about 11,000 controllers. The result is a large influx of new employees, who usually worked for 20 to 25 years, which means retirement again in the mid-2000s and now. The FAA currently has 3,000 fewer people than its target. The controller in charge is performing dual duties when an aircraft and helicopter collided near the airport in Reagan, named in January. To ensure safety, the FAA implemented mandatory overtime, which was both expensive and fraught with fatigue, which was more likely to make mistakes at the time. Duffy also offers a 20% reward for controllers who maintain retirement age. (The FAA currently has no confirmed leader.)
FAA's equipment and infrastructure are also shaken. "We use floppy disks. We use copper wire," Duffy said after the first interruption. “The system we use is ineffective for controlling flows in today’s airspace,” FAA officials said today, with years of connection between the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The FAA began a major technological reform in 2007, but it remains incomplete, partly due to insufficient funding. The Republican-driven budget sequence process in 2013 cut the agency’s budget, but Congress allowed the agency to transfer funds to pay the controller. Congressional grants to FAA equipment failed to keep up with inflation, but in 2016, Republicans in Congress proposed further cuts to the FAA's budget because they were frustrated that the overhaul was not yet completed.
In January 2023, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian defended the FAA. "I think it's clear that our political leaders, Congress and the White House must provide appeals in political leaders, Congress and the White House and correctly provide the FAA with the resources they need to do the job," he said on the call. Later that year, experts identified a series of problems at the FAA and wrote in a report: "These challenges, in process integrity, staffing, facilities, equipment and technology, are inadequate and inconsistent links." In 2024, when the Biden administration estimated that the FAA had a $5.2 billion shortage just to maintain some actions, then-Farrah Judge Mike Whitaker told the House Committee that the facilities were "some notoriously underfunded."
The FAA also had other issues, including Boeing Capture Regulatory Capture before a series of 737 MAX failed. Although these issues predate the current administration, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. Christian services have done further damage, as my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker reported in March. “Many jobs with critical security functions have indeed been sacrificed, and any possible replacements are uncertain due to the government-wide hiring freeze,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Donald Trump blamed the DEI program for the January air collision in Washington, D.C.
The pattern of neglect observed on the FAA can be seen in the federal government. Other physical infrastructures, including bridges, dams, power lines and highways, are in severe attenuation. In 2014, a major scandal rocked the Veterans Affairs Health System department, when officials with insufficient handling capabilities were hiding a long waitlist. As Ed Yong wrote Atlantic In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic revealed years of worsening, weakening the nation’s public health system (and other systems).
The fact that government spending continues to grow is well known, but growth is driven by mandatory spending on rights programs such as Medicare and Social Security, such as the age and growth of the U.S. population. Discretionary spending (i.e. everything else) has dropped the percentage of GDP for decades. The United States spent much less on these other government services than in 1962. At that time, discretionary expenditure accounted for 12.3% of GDP. In fiscal year 2024, it was about 6.3%.
Musk is learning an accelerated lesson that there are few shortcuts in the government. This is one of the reasons Doge has to continue recalling federal employees and adjusting its savings estimates. Everyone wants to reduce waste, fraud and abuse, but most government spending is not wasted, fraud or abuse. We can and should improve the way government works, but we can’t actually get nothing. As with what happened to American democracy itself, the risk is to create a hollowed-out shell - one that looks solid but does not deliver on its promises to the people.
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When Austin Estes took his sick baby son to urgent care, he struggled to change his diapers in an examination room without a smaller table. "Oh, if only mom is here," the nurse said. Estes, an education policy consultant in Washington, D.C., wondered why she thought his wife would be better at handling impossible diapers.
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watch. Season 2 Ando (Stream on Disney+) reveals Star Wars Shirley Li wrote that it might be better without the lightsaber.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to the newsletter.
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