House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster is on the cusp of launching the biggest shakeup for air travel in four decades — an attempt to strip air traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration and hand it to a separate body controlled by huge swaths of the aviation industry it's supposed to oversee.
The legislation, expected to be unveiled Wednesday, would shift the FAA's thousands of air traffic controllers to a quasi-government corporation or nonprofit, according to Republican members briefed on the bill earlier this week. Its supporters — including almost all the major airlines, three former transportation secretaries and President Barack Obama's first FAA administrator — say the long-debated move would aid efficiency, modernize air traffic control technologies faster and insulate the aviation system from fiscal feuds in Congress.
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Shuster is putting the bill on a fast track, with its first committee markup set for Feb. 11.
But the push is drawing alarm from critics including consumers' groups, small plane manufacturers and trade organizations, Delta Air Lines and some House Democrats. They say dismembering the FAA could give the airlines disproportionate control over an aviation system that also includes private planes, business jets and small airports serving rural communities. They also question whether it’s wise to gut the agency in the midst of the safest period for U.S. aviation in history.
House and Senate appropriators of both parties have also objected to removing the controllers' purse strings from Congress' hands.
“We do not believe that creating a separate air traffic entity, removed from congressional oversight, will advance efforts to modernize air traffic control,” House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) and members Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and David Price (D-N.C.) wrote in a letter to House leadership Monday.
The Obama administration has yet to stake out a clear position on the proposal. Another crucial constituency, the air traffic controllers' union, hasn't taken an official position on the bill, only on broad principles.
For both the industry and the flying public, the move would be the biggest change in aviation policy since Congress deregulated the airlines in 1978. According to a summary of Shuster's proposed legislation that POLITICO obtained in July, he appears to be trying to carve out the controllers as part of a bill reauthorizing the FAA, a matter Congress must deal with, or punt on, before the end of March.
While Shuster has kept the details under lock and key — one plugged-in lobbyist said the House deserves kudos for "keeping it all so quiet" — he briefed Republican members of the committee Monday night in the office of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), confirming long-running expectations about his broad approach to the overhaul.
"It would be handled by a private entity outside the government,” Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.) told POLITICO after the briefing. "I’ve not seen the wording of the proposal yet, we just got kind of a review of it, but it’s going to be similar to other models out there."
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) predicted that most Republicans will embrace Shuster’s proposal, although he said myriad interest groups would need to weigh in on the details of how to govern the new air traffic control body.
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“You’ve got to make sure that commercial aviation, freight, [general aviation], passengers — you’ve got to make sure all the stakeholders have a spot and the board is balanced such that no one stakeholder has too much power,” he said. But overall, he said, “the idea of devolving things from government is a great idea.”
Prominent supporters of spinning off air traffic control include the industry group Airlines for America, whose vice president for global government affairs, Shelley Rubino, has been dating Shuster, as the lawmaker acknowledged last year. Shuster has said his office established a policy that she does not lobby him or his staff.
Shuster has repeatedly said he wants to hand air traffic control functions to a quasi-governmental board that includes industry representatives. The model most closely examined during the run-up to the bill's release is Canada's, whose Nav Canada body operates as a privately run, not-for-profit corporation.
The July summary indicated that the bill — to be called the Aviation Innovation, Reform and Reauthorization Act — would create an "independent, not-for-profit corporation" with a "self-sustaining, cost-based user fee structure." The bill could potentially replace the current regime of paying for air traffic control with fuel and excise taxes, instead imposing fees based more on actual use of the system — something the airline industry has wanted for years. Shuster's staff has had ample time to make big changes since then, however.
Importantly, the summary noted that air traffic controllers' compensation and benefit plans would be kept intact, presumably to win their support for the bill.
During a George W. Bush-era attempt to privatize the air traffic controllers, their main union — the National Air Traffic Controllers Association — was a key, and very vocal, spoiler. This round, NATCA has been comparatively quiet, stressing that it is open to a non-privatized structure that would avoid the funding uncertainties and furloughs created by Congress. But the union has demurred on taking a definitive position until the text is released.
If Shuster's draft goes ahead with a user fee-based structure that includes general aviation, he probably will have the support of few if any players in the general aviation and business aviation industry. Congress' last FAA reauthorization bill, enacted in 2012, was delayed for years while a fight raged over an airline industry-driven attempt to switch toward user fees — a fight the general aviation industry won.
The myriad groups representing general aviation are arrayed for battle again. In June, the National Business Aviation Association issued a call to action to its membership warning about a “serious legislative threat." It repeated the call this month, with Ed Bolen, its president and CEO, warning of “potentially dire consequences.”
And the Obama administration is unlikely to be as supportive of the move as the Bush administration was, though it has yet to take a real position. FAA Administrator Michael Huerta has made it clear in repeated appearances that while the administration is open to looking at an air traffic control overhaul, advocates need to make the case that it would not harm safety.
Another question is whether even a Republican-controlled Congress will go along with gutting its own jurisdictional turf by giving up a big chunk of its oversight over air travel.
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Still, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he's confident in the bill's success, despite the dissent from the appropriations panels. “I would probably bank on Shuster and the [Transportation] Committee," he said, noting that "almost all their bills that come out probably have the highest bipartisan vote of any other committee."
However, the bill isn't likely to have support from the Transportation Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, at least not at first. On Monday, DeFazio said he plans to introduce his own proposal and "see who wins."
Most of the airline industry's arguments in favor of the breakup say it would make the system more efficient and reliable, in part by removing a Congress that’s allergic to raising revenues. Some supporters also call it a “critical step toward enhancing safety," as Airlines for America said in a recent statement.
Those arguments got a boost this week from allies including former Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), along with three former transportation secretaries from the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and Randy Babbitt, who was the FAA's administrator during Obama's first term.
"There was a time when the United States was the gold standard in every aspect of air traffic control," those and other former officials wrote to Shuster on Monday. "Those days of global leadership, regrettably, are gone. The U.S. no longer has the most modern equipment, the most efficient airplane routings or the best technology of any of the world’s air traffic control providers."
Opponents of the move include two senior Transportation Committee Democrats — Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and District of Columbia Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton — and a handful of consumer watchdog groups, who have banded together to fight Shuster's bill.
“The system that we have now under the current regulations has been a very strong, effective and efficient system,” Cummings told reporters last week. He added, “And we certainly don’t need to give airlines more power over the aviation system, which is precisely what they would get under the Republicans’ proposal as we know it."
Not even the airline industry is united on Shuster's proposal, however. Delta left Airlines for America last year in large part because of their disagreement on splitting up the FAA.
In a statement, Delta said removing air traffic control from the FAA “doesn’t make sense” and observed that the current system is “safer, has fewer delays and is more cost-effective than any privatized or separated [air traffic control] alternative in the world.” The airline also floated a document Monday arguing that such a move could raise fees, ultimately driving up costs for consumers and small airports.
