What’s Behind the Newark Airport Fiasco

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On this much, there is bipartisan agreement: The Federal Aviation Administration is in a bad mess. After years of exceptional safety, the U.S. air-travel system has recently been beset with near misses and, in one horrifying case, a collision. Air-traffic-control towers are badly understaffed, and controllers have now twice lost—for about 90 seconds and 30 to 90 seconds, respectively—the ability to track flights coming in and out of Newark.

“Someone should have seen this coming in the last administration,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained yesterday on CNBC.

In fact, lots of people saw it coming. Regulators, pilots, controllers, airline executives, and outside observers all warned for years that the system was falling behind and running on outdated technology. Yet successive presidential administrations and Congresses didn’t act, lulled into a false sense of stability by a record 16-year stretch with no fatal commercial-airline crashes in the United States. The struggles of the air-safety regime are especially visceral—few news items are as dramatic as a plane crash, and many people are nervous flyers to begin with—but the FAA is a lot like much of the federal government: It functioned well for a long time, but years of inattention and underfunding have quietly driven it to the brink of collapse.

The idea that the FAA can be run on the cheap is an old and enduring one. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan broke a strike by air-traffic controllers demanding more favorable working conditions, firing some 11,000 controllers. One result was a huge influx of new hires, who typically work for 20 to 25 years—which meant big cohorts retiring in the mid-2000s and again around now. The FAA is currently 3,000 controllers shy of its target staffing; the controller in charge when a plane and a helicopter collided in January near the airport named for Reagan was doing double duty. Seeking to ensure safety, the FAA has implemented mandatory overtime—which is both expensive and risks fatigue among controllers, who are then more likely to make mistakes. Duffy is also offering a 20 percent bonus to controllers who stay past retirement age. (The FAA does not currently have a confirmed leader.)

The equipment and infrastructure of the FAA are similarly shaky. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” Duffy said after the first Newark outage. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.” An FAA official said today that a link between the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport has been inoperable for years. The FAA embarked on a major overhaul of technology in 2007, but it’s still not complete—in part because of underfunding. The 2013 GOP-driven budget-sequestration process slashed the agency’s budget, but Congress allowed the agency to divert funds to pay controllers. Congress’s appropriations for FAA equipment failed to keep pace with inflation, yet in 2016, Republicans in Congress proposed further slashing the FAA’s budget because they were frustrated that the overhaul was not yet complete.

In January 2023, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian made a plea on behalf of the FAA. “I think it’s very clear that there has to be a call to action amongst our political leaders, Congress, and the White House to fund and properly provide the FAA the resources they need to do the job,” he said on a conference call. Later that year, experts identified a series of problems at the FAA, writing in a report, “These challenges, in the areas of process integrity, staffing, and facilities, equipment, and technology, all have ties to inadequate, inconsistent funding.” In 2024, when the Biden administration estimated that the FAA had a $5.2 billion shortfall simply to maintain some operations, then–FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker told a House committee that facilities were “somewhat famously underfunded.”

The FAA has other problems as well, including regulatory capture by Boeing in the years leading up to a series of 737 Max failures. Although these issues predate the current administration, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have done further damage, as my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker reported in March. “Many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze,” he wrote. Donald Trump, meanwhile, baselessly and racistly blamed the January midair collision in Washington, D.C., on DEI programs.

The pattern of neglect observed at the FAA can be seen across the federal government. Other physical infrastructure, including bridges, dams, power lines, and highways, are in a serious state of decay. In 2014, a major scandal rocked the Department of Veterans Affairs health system when it emerged that officials, dealing with insufficient capacity, were hiding long waitlists. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic revealed years of deterioration that had weakened the nation’s public-health system (and other systems).

The fact that government spending continues to grow is well known, but that growth is driven by mandatory spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which grows as the American population ages and increases. Discretionary spending—that is, everything else—has for decades declined as a percentage of GDP. The U.S. is spending much less on these other government services than it did in 1962. Back then, discretionary spending was 12.3 percent of GDP; in fiscal year 2024, it was roughly 6.3 percent.

Musk is learning an accelerated lesson that few shortcuts exist in government; that’s one reason DOGE has had to keep recalling federal employees and adjusting down its savings estimates. Everyone wants to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, but most government spending is not wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. We can and should improve how the government works, but we can’t actually get something for nothing. As with what’s happening to American democracy itself, the risk is in creating a hollowed-out shell—one that appears solid but fails to deliver on its promise to the people.

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Today’s News

President Donald Trump met with Syria’s interim president and urged him to normalize relations with Israel.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the workforce cuts to his department during his testimony in a House-committee hearing.
California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed scaling back on health-care benefits for undocumented immigrants in an effort to help balance the state’s budget.

Evening Read

Photo of a mother leaving for work, waving goodbye to her husband and children — Elliott Erwitt / Magnum

The Default-Parent Problem

By Olga Khazan

When Austin Estes took his sick infant son to urgent care, he struggled to change his diaper in an exam room not equipped with a changing table. “Oh, if only Mom was here,” the nurse said. Estes, an education-policy consultant in Washington, D.C., wondered why she’d think his wife would better handle an impossible diaper change.

Read the full article.