The complete dysfunction in Washington caused by conservatives’ obstinate approach to federal debt is a reason to sell part of the government itself to corporate interests, a Republican committee chair said Tuesday.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) said that “a governance and financing structure that is broken beyond repair” should force the Federal Aviation Administration to privatize part of the nation’s air traffic control system.
The appeal to sell off management of the system, Shuster said, does not result from “an indictment of the FAA’s leadership team, or our air traffic controllers, who are the best in the world.”
The agency is working on a new system, callled NextGen, which is aimed at easing the flow of air traffic. It is slated to cost $40 billion and be finished by 2020, according to The Hill. Shuster noted that $6 billion has already been spent on NextGen, and that the program is behind schedule.
The FAA hasn’t been able to fully invest in the upgrade, given the constant Congressional bickering over budgetary matters, The Hill also noted.
Those squabbles became the new normal in Washington in 2011, after the watershed Tea Party midterm victory in November of the year before. Defenders of the incumbent air traffic control management team were quick to point that out.
“For years, the FAA has been faced with unstable, unpredictable funding where interruptions in the funding stream have negatively affected all aspects of the FAA,” Paul Rinaldi, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association argued before the committee.
“The agency has had to spread its resources thinly between staffing a 24/7 operation, as well as the modernization and daily maintenance required to sustain an aging infrastructure,” he noted, adding that the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the sequestration cuts it mandated have exacerbated any problems that the agency encountered beforehand. Rinaldi said the agency has been made to furlough employees, cut services, and delay the implementation of “preventative measures” due to constant fiscal uncertainty.
While Schuster recognized this and, as mentioned before, praised the FAA–from its rank-and-file to its leaders–he nonetheless described the agency, on the whole, as being incapable.
“As a government agency, the FAA is simply not set up to determine risks, pursue the most cost-efficient investments, manage people to produce results, reward excellence, or punish incompetence like a normal business,” he said.
“After three decades of various modernization attempts and billions of taxpayer dollars spent, we’re nowhere near where we need to be,” he also claimed.
