America's Longest Government Shutdown Shows Why We Must Free Air Traffic Control from Politics

Nations that moved air traffic control out of politics have better tech, no shutdown chaos, and stable funding. Congress keeps choosing dysfunction instead.

As of today, we are living through the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history, surpassing the 35-day shutdown of 2019 during the first Trump administration. Since 1980, there have been 11 such shutdowns, most of which have left air traffic controllers to work without pay for the duration. Consequently, as the current one drags on, flight delays and cancellations continue to increase. Eventually, this shutdown will end, controllers will receive their back pay, and life will go on. But how many controllers will have resigned in the meantime?

Other Countries Have Figured This Out

Air traffic control (ATC) is too important to be vulnerable to politics. Around the world, governments have acknowledged this fact and depoliticized their ATC systems, beginning with the reformist Labor government of New Zealand in 1987. They removed the ATC system from their transport ministry and permitted the aviation user fees that had been paid to the government to instead be paid to the new Airways New Zealand.

It worked so well that within a decade, a dozen more governments had followed suit, realizing that ATC is essentially a public utility, analogous to electricity. A stream of ATC user-fee payments is a bondable revenue stream that has been utilized by ATC utilities to finance large-scale technology upgrades and consolidate aging ATC facilities into a smaller number of modern ones.

Today, roughly 100 countries receive their air traffic control services from user-funded utilities. Australia, Canada, Germany, and the U.K. all have newer, more-advanced technology than our Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and all of them are self-funded and independent of government budgets. If any of their governments were to have a shutdown like ours, air traffic control would continue to operate normally.

Why Haven't We Removed Politics From Our ATC System? 

The most powerful opponents to reforming the current ATC system are members of Congress and the business jet community. Depoliticizing U.S. air traffic control will not happen until those two obstacles are overcome.

Congress likes to micromanage the FAA. Every five years or so, when it's time to reauthorize the FAA, Congress imposes a whole raft of demands and policy changes (some well-meaning, some make-work, and some flatly foolish). Congress also meekly accepts the FAA budget proposal, which falls far short of what is needed to modernize or replace decrepit facilities and obsolete technologies. The FAA can only submit a budget request that has been vetted by the Office of Management and Budget, which is focused on cost cutting (and keeping the FAA within the meager revenue brought in from airline ticket taxes).

There have been two attempts to make our ATC system independent of the government. As part of Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government agenda, the Clinton administration did a major study that envisioned a self-funded U.S. Air Traffic Services corporation, with aviation user fees and bonding authority. It received one hearing in Congress and died. 

A second attempt took place during the first Trump administration, championed by Rep. Bill Shuster (R–Pa.), who chaired the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It was modeled after Nav Canada—a privately run, nonprofit corporation that owns and operates Canada's civil air navigation system—and had the support of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. It was also supported by the Business Roundtable, nearly all the major airlines, and it received editorial endorsements from nearly all the top-10 newspapers' editorial boards (excluding The New York Times). Two versions were approved by the committee but never reached a vote on the House floor.

The campaign against the bill was led and funded by the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA), a lobbying group for private business aviation. It bankrolled a coalition of private pilots, rural airport directors, and small-city chambers of commerce, portraying the proposed nonprofit, stakeholder-governed corporation as a takeover of ATC by the big airlines that would shortchange private planes and rural states. NBAA's underlying interest was to preserve its fuel tax as opposed to the weight-distance user fees that business jets all over the world pay.

There is every reason to expect that in future years there will be more federal government shutdowns—it's one of the only things Congress does anymore. But how many more times will it take before we decide to join the global consensus that ATC is a public utility that can and should be funded by fees based on its customers' use?

Maybe This Time?

I was encouraged to see The New York Times release a video editorial on August 10 criticizing the business jet lobby for opposing ATC reform. Additionally, during his first term, President Donald Trump endorsed Shuster's bill and even held a White House event to promote it. The current five-year FAA authorization is set to expire in 2029. Preparations for that effort will be underway in earnest in 2028—Trump's last year in office. 

Several Clinton-era Democrats who supported the effort to convert ATC into a public utility decades ago are still active and supportive of this kind of change. A bipartisan coalition is conceivable. 

Depoliticizing the U.S. ATC system would be the most effective way to insulate it from inevitable future government shutdowns. Building the coalition to get this done should begin now.