CONGRESS KEEPS CHOOSING DYSFUNCTION.

I think it's by design.  Reason's Robert Poole, their resident transportation maven, suggests that the United States lags behind other industrialized countries by treating air traffic control as a federal function.

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.

I'm cynical enough to give credence to the idea that air traffic control makes for a useful hostage to protect continued fiscal incontinence.  Insurance buyers on the Obamacare exchanges?  Psh.  Food stamp recipients?  Moochers.  Inconvenience getting to that conference or family gathering?  Crisis!!!

There are network problems that make treating the air traffic control network as a public utility.  Union Pacific can set up a Harriman Dispatching Center in Omaha, but it controls the movement of Union Pacific trains on Union Pacific tracks, and I have no doubt that they will be able to delay freight from coast to coast should their merger with Norfolk Southern come to pass.  Stateside, the air carriers would likely engage in a lot of haggling over whose planes should be given preference, then there are the military flights, and don't forget the recreational flyers and the private jet crowd.

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?

Rent seekers will do what rent seekers do.  I remember, years ago, similar arguments being advanced in Charles Peters's Washington Monthly, which was calling attention to the rent-seeking of the corporate jet fleets, who were doing all sorts of work among the recreational and experimental aviation hobbyists to keep living at the expense of taxpayers.  So it often is with public provision of services that could be traded on markets.  It's also possible that the recreational flyers are working their Congressmen to keep limiting the activities of the F.A.A.: prowl through the swap meet area at the Oshkosh fly-in and see if you can find anything complimentary of that agency on offer.

To suggest that Congress loves treating the F.A.A. as a hostage does little to disabuse me of the notion that these shutdown or debt ceiling standoffs are by design.