On April 28 the Newark International Airport, one of the busiest in the country serving nearly 50 million passengers annually, experienced a significant equipment failure causing air traffic controllers to lose visual and verbal contact with pilots for 90 seconds. We were fortunate that no accidents occurred as a result. 5 air traffic controllers who were on duty during the outage have taken the 45-day trauma leave their union contract entitles them to, evidence they are not well-suited to this work and should not return. Many flights into and out of Newark will be delayed or cancelled for the foreseeable future until short term fixes are in place. Last Friday, Newark experienced another outage. The Newark failure is not an isolated incident. It is symptomatic of the age and unsustainability of air traffic control systems throughout the country. This is a case study packed full of lessons about government “management” and how it differs from the private sector. We would be wise to learn from them.
A Tale of Ineptitude
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is often referred to as “the investigative arm of Congress” issued a report on March 4 of this year and provided testimony to the House Subcommittee on Aviation and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The testimony drew on a September 2024 report on the unsustainable Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems throughout the country and a November 2023 report on Next Gen, which is the acronym being used for the major system overhaul that is needed. The urgency of this issue cannot be overstated. The US airspace accommodates 45,000 flights each day and the systems are so old that parts are unavailable and many technicians who had expertise with the existing technology have retired.
The GAO testified that 9 recommendations they made to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) remain unaddressed. In 2023, a shutdown of airspace due to an outage of an aging ATC system prompted the FAA to do an operational risk assessment in order to prioritize essential upgrades. The findings included 51 of the 138 systems in the country are “unsustainable” and 54 systems are “potentially unsustainable”. These systems “have critical operational impacts on safety and efficiency of the national airspace.”
The GAO testified that the FAA response has been so slow that, as of May 2024, plans for the systems that the GAO found were “especially concerning were at least 6 – 10 years away”. 4 of the systems had no plan.
The FAA released its first comprehensive plan to improve ATC services in 1982 but it went nowhere. In 2003 Congress required the FAA to begin planning and coordinating a comprehensive, multidecade ATC modernization project by November 2023. They call it the Next Generation Air Transportation System (Next Gen). The FAA spent $14 billion on Next Gen between 2007 and 2022 and project the cost will be at least $35 billion through 2030.
The original goal was to have Next Gen in place by 2025 but the goal was pushed back to at least 2030 because the project has been fraught with “challenges” including software development complexity, unanticipated system requirements, insufficient stakeholder involvement, and unanticipated events such as government shutdowns. These excuses are an indictment of project leadership. FAA officials acknowledge “gaps in accountability” and say they are planning improvements. Michael Whittaker, Joe Biden’s choice for FAA Administrator, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. He resigned the day Donald Trump was inaugurated.
A Profile of Incompetence
A well-spoken, incompetent person in a position of authority is very dangerous. While debating Pete Buttigieg, then the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for the Democratic nomination for President, candidate Joe Biden said the biggest things Buttigieg ever managed were fixing sidewalks and installing decorative street lights. He turned around and made him the Secretary of Transportation in his Administration.
In November 2024, Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation celebrated the 3rd anniversary of the signing of the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan infrastructure law” with an announcement and a video entitled “The Big Deal”. They claimed they were investing in American workers, neighborhoods and transportation.
More than 66,000 projects had received funding and were moving forward in all 50 states, Washington DC and US territories. $3.4 billion in grants had been awarded to expand intercity passenger rail, make roads safer, improve ports and strengthen supply chains. $1.2 billion went to “accelerate the use of cleaner materials that are critical to building safe and sustainable infrastructure”. The Biden Administration was masterful at imbedding their environmental agenda everywhere with clever language.
$25 billion was allocated for airport infrastructure with the emphasis on improving passenger experience, expanding capacity, increasing accessibility and reducing delays. This included an airport infrastructure grants program of $14.5 billion over 5 years that can be invested in runways and taxiways, safety and sustainability. At the 3-year mark 1,500 airports were modernizing terminals, expanding operations or improving runways. There was no mention of ATC safety.
Buttigieg brashly proclaimed “The 2020’s will be viewed as a turning point that ushered in the improvements that that will sustain our 21st and even 22nd century economy”.
Last Thursday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced a plan to totally modernize the ATC systems. He stressed Congress will have to provide all of the money up front and significantly simplify the permitting process to facilitate accomplishing the project within a few years rather than a decade. The American people should reject the idea that any new money is required to address this very urgent priority. Congress has already allocated $1.2 trillion for “infrastructure”, much of which is unspent, and there needs to be a reordering of priorities to ensure the safety of air travel. It’s time to demand that Congress stop using goodies for everyone as a way to buy votes and start focusing on the priority needs of the country.
Sean Duffy has no relevant experience to prepare him to oversee implementing effective solutions for the mess he has on his hands. He is a lawyer who was District Attorney of Ashland County, Wisconsin for 10 years, served in Congress for 8 years, and had a private sector career in entertainment and news television. Effective administrators of large bureaucracies do not have expertise in every area they manage but they do need key people they can rely on who have the necessary technical and management expertise and are philosophically aligned with their objectives. Duffy would be wise to follow Trump’s lead as he determines who to trust with what will be a major test of his competence. Trump selected Dan Caine, a little-known career fighter jet pilot to become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He loves to tell the story of meeting Caine in Iraq and being told he is known as “Razin’ Caine”. Trump asked him how long it would take to defeat ISIS and Caine responded a week. When Trump told him the military bigwigs said it would take 2 years, Caine told him that’s because they are based in Washington DC and his opinion was formed from being in the field. He told Trump no one ever asked the people with boots on the ground what they thought. The one caution every effective administrator understands is the importance of being able to differentiate the big talkers from the big doers. Razin Caine is the real deal by all accounts. Duffy needs to surround himself with big doers who are real deals in the FAA.
Positioning People for High Performance
The FAA needs about 14,000 air traffic controllers to safely guide 2.7 million travelers through our air space every day. There have been 3,000 vacancies (21%) for years. Training consists of classroom study for several months at the Air Traffic Control Academy in Oklahoma City followed by 2 – 3 years of in the field experience. The information the FAA has posted on its website about becoming an air traffic controller is stunning for what it reveals.
The list of criteria includes being younger than 31 years old. The reason for depriving the profession of capable individuals with life experience in their 30’s, 40’s and beyond? To enable controllers to work the 25 years they must to qualify for a pension at the mandatory retirement age of 56! Who thinks like this? Additional criteria appear to be so rigorous they should be subject to immediate review. According to the FAA fewer than 10% of applicants meet requirements and are accepted – solid evidence that there is something significantly wrong with the recruitment and selection process. 35% of those who make it into the program wash out.
There is no question there are more than enough qualified people in our country who would find air traffic control a very satisfying profession. My certainty about this comes from what I learned from my clinical years as an advanced practice critical care nurse and nearly 30 years as a hospital administrator responsible for the delivery of clinical services in a large, complex hospital.
My colleagues from many clinical disciplines and I were drawn to practicing critical care medicine and wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. We were accountable every day for life and death decisions and were exposed to horrific tragedies; but knowing we were making a difference in people’s lives was very meaningful to us. The idea that “stressful work” burns people out gets pushed by those who don’t know how to create the conditions necessary to support the work.
As an administrator I came to understand that the job of executive leaders is to position those who do the work of the organization with the people, resources, technology, skills and information they need to perform at high levels. It isn’t bad work that drives workers out, it’s bad environments. Clueless pretenders in leadership roles who do not have the insight and skills to create the environment to support the work always want to throw money at people as if any amount of money would keep people working in a miserable environment. We can expect the clueless members of Congress and government agencies to suggest we can solve the shortage of air traffic controllers by paying people more.
The Dire Need for The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
It is reasonable to assume that the mess that has been exposed within the FAA is just a microcosm of what exists throughout government. Agencies that squander money, are steeped in bureaucracy, are ineffective and inefficient, and produce little in the way of meaningful outcomes would cease to exist in the private sector without the endless stream of revenue provided by the American taxpayers. It’s time for Americans to demand our government entities produce outcomes from our investments rather than spin aimlessly in their processes. The liberals and the media made Elon Musk a target for destruction when Trump asked him to lead the DOGE initiative. He is the richest man in the world because he capitalized on the accessibility of the American dream to those who have vision, ingenuity and the work ethic to chase their aspirations. We need Elon Musk and others just like him more than ever to apply their know-how from the private sector to government functions that are out of control. In hindsight, and I say this tongue in cheek, perhaps the Department of Government Effectiveness would have been a better name. Efficiency, after all, is just one component of effectiveness.
