Welcome to New York

The FAA meltdown and the limits of "small government"

Good day dear readers! I am glad to be writing from upstate New York, where I’ve come to visit my mother and our (perfect) dog. I’ve been digging in the dirt all the week in pursuit of my very own English garden. My nails and hands look terrible and I’m happy as a lark.

I was much less happy last Monday, however, when the flight I was on from London got diverted to Philadelphia because the air traffic control systems had just crashed at Newark airport. Many of us tried to de-plane in Philly, but were not allowed to do so because there were insufficient customs officials present to process an international flight. Another point for government dysfunction! So we sat in the middle of the airfield for 2.5 hours before we got news that we would be able to fly to Newark. I am a nervous flyer on the best of days, and was very stressed about the prospect of entering one of the country’s most congested airspaces with a barely functional FAA. Given that one air traffic controller described the scenario last week as “the most dangerous situation you could have,” I was right to be anxious.

All told, over 1500 flights were delayed last week on account of the equipment failure and staff shortages and dozens were diverted midair. Back in February, CNN reported that the US is short nearly 4000 air traffic controllers - forcing the 10,800 we do have to work mandatory overtime and burn out more quickly, making it difficult to increase the total number of controllers:

“The working conditions … have become consistently unsafe for those in the sky, as well as the physical and mental health of the controllers,” wrote a controller in NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System examined by CNN. “Overloaded sectors and sessions over 2, sometimes 3 hours have become common occurrences. We have recently had a heart attack, multiple panic attacks (including my own), people losing their medicals due to depression, and some that just outright quit the FAA because it has gotten so bad.”

Here we can clearly see the link between poor working conditions, mediocre pay, and public safety. But the FAA meltdown is also the product of outdated equipment and systems - the result of a sustained failure to invest in infrastructure over many decades. And that failure is part of a broader trend: the sorts of public funding preferred by the “small government” neoliberals who have dominated our politics since the Reagan revolution.

Here I found it instructive to examine the FAA’s annual budget since 2007. I stretched my Excel skills until they broke, then phoned a friend to put together this chart, so I hope you’re grateful:

The 2025 budget (which was prepared under the Biden administration) is for $21.8 billion, including $3.6 billion for facilities and equipment as well as a special $1 billion for facility replacement and radar modernization. The last time there was such a major request (as far as I could discover in my admittedly not exhaustive research), was in FY 2012, during which the Obama administration requested $18.7 billion. This amount, the agency noted, represented a “17 percent increase over this year’s appropriated amount and includes significant funding increases for infrastructure and modernization projects.” However the actual 2012 budget was $16.1 billion, barely up from 2011, indicating that most of those infrastructure and modernization projects didn’t happen. Why?

The FAA’s infrastructure plans fell afoul of two legislative measures: The Budget Control Bill of 2011 and the American Tax Payers Relief Act of 2012, bipartisan bills that raised the debt ceiling, made many of the George W. Bush tax cuts permanent and created a process of mandatory budget reduction (“sequestration”) that aimed to shave $917 billion off the federal budget over ten years. In a word, austerity. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, “the sequester cuts reduced FAA spending for FY2013 by about $636 million below the amount specified in the FY2013 continuing budget resolution.” As the FAA began to furlough employees, however, Congress acted to limit the fallout:

To implement the sequester-related reductions, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began to furlough personnel, including air traffic controllers, on April 21, 2013. In the wake of concerns about the adverse effects of furloughs on air travel, the Senate passed S. 853, the Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013 (RFDA), on April 25, 2013, by unanimous consent. The bill provided new authority to the Secretary of Transportation to transfer up to $253 million to FAA's "operations" account from other FAA accounts, including discretionary grants-in-aid for airports. The next day, the House agreed to H.R. 1765 under suspension of the rules. Under agreement, H.R. 1765, being identical in content to S. 853, was presented to the President on April 30, 2013, and was enacted on May 1, 2013, becoming P.L. 113-9. FAA halted furlough actions even before the bill was signed by President Obama.

Congress did not restore full funding levels, however, or get anywhere near the $18.7 billion requested for FY2012. As you can see above, the FY2013 budget actually dropped by $800 million, and would not overtake $16 billion again until 2018 (the recent increases were due to the Biden administration measures including the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act).

Tempting as it is to blame government dysfunction on the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s chainsaw—400 FAA staffers were laid off in February—the budget over time tells a more troubling story about the bipartisan cooperation that has been required to create a government that can’t govern. We are facing a real crisis not of government efficiency but of government capacity — one that has been designed to discredit the public sector and drive people into the arms of the private sphere. But with the FAA, we reach the limits of privatized solutions and are left hoping the arsonists will put out the fires.

The agency’s 2025 budget of $21.8 billion is a lot of money in real terms, but even if doubled would it represent a drop in the bucket compared to our $850 billion in defense spending (for which the money is always there). Notably, the FY2025 Department of Defense budget features “$37.3 billion in facilities investments including $17.5 billion in Military Construction and Family Housing programs and $19.8 billion for Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization.”

As the defense budget rightly notes, “People are at the heart of each of these NDS [National Defense Strategy] strategic approaches and the Department’s most valuable asset. The FY 2025 budget continues to Cultivate the Workforce We Need by Taking Care of Our People.” Which raises the question: Why aren’t our air traffic controllers similarly worth taking care of? A state that only has endless funds available for violence is a state that will, over time, stop functioning. Planes will start falling from the sky and all that.