Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Travelers wait to check in to their flights at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey, May 5, 2025.
Donald Trump has been in office for less than four months, not enough time to be the prime source of damage to the air traffic control system. His administration fired some 400 key safety and technical staff at the FAA. But the failure to adequately invest in airport infrastructure and trained personnel has been going on for more than 40 years. To be precise, it dates to Ronald Reagan’s assault on the air traffic controllers’ union, known as PATCO, in 1981.
What’s more, that single act was only the beginning of failed policy, by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. It’s one more aspect of America’s disinvestment in public infrastructure and public systems.
The Biden administration made a good start in addressing that shortfall, but only a start. Trump and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, yet another senior official from Fox News, are now making things much worse.
We have been incredibly lucky in that there have been relatively few fatal crashes of late, despite a lot of near misses. The recent crashes and the three communications outages that forced the temporary shutdown of Newark Airport and the cancellation of flights are the fruits of decades of failed policy, and worse is likely to come.
According to Bill McGee of the American Economic Liberties Project, the most knowledgeable critic of failed policies on airline regulation and air traffic control, there are about three times as many flights as in 1985, but roughly the same number of air traffic controllers, creating extreme shortages. The mess at Newark was partly the result of controllers being transferred on an emergency basis to Philadelphia.
Even worse, as McGee points out, is the crazy quilt of technical systems for air traffic control that are decades behind their European counterparts. Some airports use antiquated radar for air traffic control, while others use satellites. At the same airport, some runways rely on radar while others rely on satellites. Incredibly, in some cases the same runway uses different technical communications systems depending on which direction a plane lands.
“There are about 500 commercial airports in the United States,” McGee says. “Each one is different. It’s a patchwork.”
The FAA is currently short about 3,500 air traffic controllers relative to targeted staffing levels. Despite significant hiring, FAA controller staffing is still down 10 percent from 2012 because of retirements. The resulting increased stress on controllers only accelerates burnout and retirements.
Modernizing the system will take tens of billions of dollars, and more than one administration. How did the Trump administration begin? As part of the DOGE project, the FAA fired some 400 employees. They included critical technical staff responsible for repairing air traffic control systems when they go down and updating digital maps that pilots use in flight.
Department of Transportation spokesperson Halee Dobbins pooh-poohed the criticism, saying that those fired “represented less than 1% of FAA’s more than 45,000 employees.” McGee responds, “That’s like saying that the hospital has thousands of employees and we only fired the surgeons.”
Biden’s former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, is making noises about another run for president. Buttigieg is prized by his fans for his ability to explain complex public-policy issues in simple English and make progressive approaches sound like only so much common sense.
But Buttigieg was a lousy transportation secretary. It took a huge amount of public pressure for Buttigieg to move beyond token slaps on the wrist as airlines overbooked, scheduled flights for which they lacked pilots, refused to compensate passengers for canceled or badly delayed flights, and left passengers stranded on runways for many hours in order to save a few bucks. Buttigieg also let the air traffic mess fester.
Duffy will be worse. He does propose investing more money in modernizing air traffic control systems, with an initial outlay of $12.5 billion. But at a recent Duffy press briefing, Trump made a surprise appearance and said that to modernize the system, “we are going to give a big, beautiful contract to one company,” repeating a plan proposed at an April 30 cabinet meeting.
That sounds a lot like Elon Musk. Surely Musk has already done enough.
Here’s what’s puzzling. Air traffic control and safe skies are not in the same category as, say, Medicaid or food stamps. They are not subsidies for the poor. The typical airline passenger is middle-class or upper-class. Yet presidents of both parties have underinvested in airport systems and airline safety. It’s part of the larger problem of America’s chronic undervaluation of public systems.
