For every actual disaster such as the collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late Sunday night, there are dozens of close calls. The force of air traffic controllers has been seriously understaffed for decades. The damage dates all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, in 1981.
Pete Buttigieg, as President Biden’s transportation secretary, had four years to fix this shortfall. While hiring did increase, as of the end of 2024 staffing was still below 2016 levels as the number of flights increased. Some 40 percent of the nation’s 290 FAA-controlled terminals were categorized as understaffed, 76 of them by more than 20 percent.
Needless to say, thanks to DOGE and periodic government shutdowns, conditions for controllers have only worsened under Trump. Retirements have increased. As of late 2025, 77 percent of the busiest airports were staffed below the FAA’s 85 percent safety threshold.
LaGuardia has 33 controllers, out of a goal of 37, which sounds not too bad. But as the FAA has had trouble recruiting, training, and retaining controllers, the agency moves the goalposts by setting targets that are themselves inadequate.
Our friend Jim Fallows, who pilots his own plane and is a buff about all things having to do with flying, did the deepest postmortem on exactly what happened at LaGuardia. He reported on his Substack that a single controller was performing multiple operations, each of which required intense concentration.
As Fallows writes, the one controller was “working both ‘Tower’ and ‘Ground’ frequencies … listening to two separate radio frequencies at the same time, and broadcasting on them in turn. On the tower frequency, he is clearing planes for takeoff and landing … On the ground frequency, he tells pilots where to taxi, and what runways or taxiways they may cross.”
This overload is all too normal. It took only one unforeseen emergency—a United pilot reporting a smell that might indicate fire—to overwhelm the controller’s capacity, as he also has to inject a fire truck into the mix. On an audio recording, as the inbound Air Canada flight crashes into the fire truck, the controller is heard to say, in despair, “I screwed up!”
No, you didn’t. The system screwed up, and it screwed you. And it will keep screwing up and will kill more people until it is adequately staffed.
Today On TAP
This story first appeared in our Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
Meanwhile, consider those long lines to get through airport security. Yes, they are significantly worse due to sick-outs of TSA staff who are tired of not getting paid during the partial government shutdown.
But one group of passengers is whisked through security, thanks to a private service called Clear. If you sign up for Clear, for $209 a year, you will be escorted into a separate lane with no delays. The Wall Street Journal reports that passengers have downloaded the Clear app 289,000 times since the beginning of March as the failure to fund TSA led to longer lines, and that Clear’s stock is up around 60 percent from a month ago.
There is something profoundly offensive about this. It’s one thing when affluent passengers purchase more comfort by flying first-class. It’s something else when some citizens are able to buy their way out of security lines that the rest of us have to suffer.
It’s all the worse because TSA has devised a perfectly good expedited public security system, TSA PreCheck, that costs only $76 to $85 for a five-year membership. It’s in TSA’s interest to prevent bottlenecks and to make the extra cost affordable. For-profit Clear is parasitic on TSA.
By contrast, consider the improvement in how long you have to wait to get into the country, whether in Europe or the U.S. Thanks to biometric systems administered by public agencies, not private vendors, the wait to get through customs and immigration and on to baggage claim is down to almost nothing.
Clear is now branching out. It has just announced a partnership with Epic Systems, the near-monopoly hospital database vendor that helps hospitals game Medicare reimbursements and make life miserable for clinicians, as I found in this investigative piece.
Clear and Epic are examples of creeping privatization, which afflicts everything from private prisons to for-profit “Medicare Advantage.” What these companies have in common is that they leech competence and resources from needed public systems, which are more efficient and more accountable.
While Trump did not start this trend, Trump is its reductio ad absurdum. He views ICE as his private army, and he sent ICE to “help” TSA at beleaguered airports. But ICE agents are not trained to do anything that TSA does, and mostly they are standing around, loitering, not clear if they are supposed to look helpful or menacing. Steve Bannon proposed the idea on his podcast, War Room, as a rehearsal for possible ICE disruption of the November elections.
If those elections go well and if a Democrat is elected president in 2028, a massive rebuilding job of the public sector is a top priority—not just to reverse Trump’s marauding but to repair decades of pre-Trump neglect and willful sabotage.
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