The Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have enough air traffic controllers to control the nation’s air traffic. It’s a big problem. Airlines have been forced to delay, reschedule or cancel thousands of flights, especially at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. If you’ve flown recently, perhaps you’ve had some extra time on the tarmac to wonder what went wrong.
A big part of the answer: Government shutdowns.
Repeated disruptions to the F.A.A.’s funding over the last 15 years, caused by shutdowns and other budget fights, have played a key role in preventing the agency from hiring and training enough controllers. As Congress lurches and sways toward another potential shutdown, the F.A.A.’s travails illustrate the stakes.
Shutdowns tend to be brief, because Americans are soon reminded that the government does important things. But the end of a shutdown doesn’t mean that everything springs back to normal. Some of the damage endures. A government shutdown in 2013 wiped out the annual research season for the U.S. Antarctic Program, causing more than two dozen scientific studies to lose a year of data. Another shutdown, beginning in December 2018, forced the cancellation of about 86,000 immigration court hearings, some of which took years to reschedule. During that shutdown, unsupervised tourists cut down Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park. The slow-growing trees can take 50 years to reach full height.
The funding disruptions are particularly difficult for the F.A.A. It takes years to train air traffic controllers, and there are limits on how many can be trained at one time. When the pipeline isn’t fed, the agency falls behind — and you end up stuck in the wrong city.
The F.A.A.’s struggles are anatomized in a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which convened a panel of experts to examine why the agency was having such a hard time putting bodies in air traffic control towers.
In the early 2010s, every federal agency was preparing for a large cohort of baby boomers to walk into retirement. The F.A.A.’s challenge was particularly acute because it had hired many of its controllers around the same time, as replacements for the strikers fired by President Ronald Reagan in August 1981.
But the National Academies found that the F.A.A. consistently hired fewer workers than the numbers its own internal models showed that it would need. The agency fell short in eight of the 10 years between 2013 and 2023. Over that period, it ended up hiring less than two-thirds of the workers it had estimated it would need.
The funding disruptions began in 2011, when Republicans who had just taken control of Congress insisted that they wouldn’t raise the federal debt ceiling to meet the government’s existing obligations until the Obama administration agreed to reduce future spending. Under the resulting deal, the F.A.A. was forced to impose a hiring freeze through much of 2013 and 2014. When Republicans seeking further spending cuts forced a government shutdown for 16 days in the fall of 2013, the agency closed its training academy and sent recruits back to their homes. As a result of the disruptions, during those two years, the F.A.A. started training about half the number of controllers it had needed.
The agency hasn’t been able to make up for those shortfalls. One issue is that it has needed the full capacity of its training academy just to meet its existing annual goals. In 2016 and 2017, the two years the agency actually hit its hiring targets, it was basically treading water.
The second issue is that the hits kept coming. Three shutdowns in 2018 and 2019 once again disrupted recruiting and forced the academy to close.
The impact wasn’t immediate. It takes an average of five years to train controllers to work in the most important facilities. But even before Covid once again shut down the F.A.A.’s training process, the staffing shortages were taking a toll.
In recent years, the government has urged airlines to reduce summer flight schedules at some of the nation’s most popular airports because it can’t handle the volume. United Airlines, for example, cut about 10 percent of its scheduled flights in and out of Newark because arriving flights were experiencing average delays of two hours. Even with fewer flights, the agency is stretched to the limits of its capacity. The National Academies found the F.A.A. increasingly relies on mandatory overtime shifts and six-day weeks to cover for staffing shortages. The overtime budget has increased by 300 percent since 2013.
The reliance on overworked controllers is particularly dangerous, because the F.A.A. relies on outdated technologies that it has struggled to upgrade or replace. As in so many other areas, the United States has fallen behind other nations that use more modern technologies to guide larger numbers of airplanes safely through crowded parts of the sky.
Close calls have piled up in recent years. In a 2023 incident at the Austin, Texas, airport, a Southwest plane was cleared to take off from the same runway on which a FedEx plane had been cleared to land. The planes nearly collided. There is no clear evidence that staffing shortages played a role in the January collision of a helicopter and an American Airlines jet attempting to land at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. But a wide range of experts warn that accidents are increasingly likely.
One possible corrective is to remove the government from its role. Nations including Australia, Canada and Germany have created stand-alone corporations, funded by industry, to operate their air traffic control systems. The F.A.A. already collects a large portion of its funding directly from the aviation industry. It could be fully funded in the same way.
Alternatively, some congressional Republicans are proposing to avoid future disruptions in funding — and in the supply of air traffic controllers — by exempting the F.A.A.’s training programs from shutdowns, as Congress already exempts the air traffic control system.
Either approach would improve on the current situation, but both miss the larger point: Shutdowns cause unpredictable and lasting damage. If our elected representatives once again fail to perform their basic responsibilities, and the government once again shuts down, other things will break — and the consequences will be with us for a long time.
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Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for The Times editorial board. He is based in Washington. @BCAppelbaum • Facebook
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