Who’s responsible for the aviation mess?

Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

Picking out the worst performer among Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees is a tough job — it’s a competitive race, after all — but one member who deserves to be in the running by almost any measure of incompetence is Sean Duffy, the secretary of Transportation. Duffy is a classic example of someone who knows who’s responsible for the s****ups on his watch, and it’s never him. He has spent the last weeks and months blaming the Biden administration for numerous operational failures in our air traffic system since he took over. Those include the Jan. 29 midair collision over Washington, DC, that cost 67 air passengers their lives, as well as several near-misses on the ground. Some Trump Cabinet members have more important portfolios than Duffy — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, neither of whom has displayed anything approaching basic competence at their job, come immediately to mind.

But the American public is bound to be particularly sensitive to the functioning of our transportation infrastructure. That’s especially true when it comes to the safety and reliability of air travel; every flight delay and safety-related mishap hits American travellers in the gut.

The highest-profile failure (so far) is the disaster named Newark Liberty International Airport, where flight delays can last for the better part of a day and questions about safety are rife. Duffy, a former reality show contestant and four-term Congressman, comes to the blame game with dirty hands. Let’s take a look.

First, here’s what he’s said about the condition of FAA operations and staffing. “I think it is clear that the blame belongs with the last administration,” he said on Monday during a news conference at DOT headquarters. “Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken.”

He said, “During COVID, when people weren’t flying? That was a perfect time to fix these problems.” A couple of points are pertinent here. First, in 2019, when Duffy was a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, the bill to fund the Department of Transportation among other agencies came before the House. Duffy voted against it. So did 179 other members of the GOP caucus; 12 Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure.

Second, the pandemic year in which “people weren’t flying” was 2020. That year, the domestic passenger count plummeted to 369.4 million from 926.7 million the previous year. It was the lowest figure since 1984. Who was president in 2020? Not Biden, but Donald Trump.

After 2020, passenger loads crept back up, reaching 666.2 million in 2021 and continuing higher to the record of 982.7 million last year. If there was an opportunity to upgrade the air traffic system at the least inconvenience to passengers, it was 2020. But nothing was done then, on Trump’s watch.

I asked the Department of Transportation last week if Duffy could reconcile these evidently misleading and inconsistent statements. I’m still waiting for a reply.

Duffy has maintained that it’s still safe to fly in and out of Newark, despite outages during which air traffic controllers’ screens went black and radios went silent — for 30 seconds on April 28 and 90 seconds on May 9. A backup system failed at the airport May 11 for 45 minutes, causing delays and cancellations for hundreds of flights.

Duffy admitted to the right-wing radio host David Webb on May 12 that he had switched his wife’s flight reservation for the next day from Newark to LaGuardia airport. He subsequently explained that he didn’t say to do so because he thought Newark was unsafe, but to spare her a long delay. In other words, he had found a solution for his family, but not for the overall travelling public, which didn’t speak well for his management of the mess at Newark.

It’s proper to note that the Federal Aviation Administration has been in an operational funk for years. Duffy can try to blame Biden, but that’s a smokescreen. During Trump’s first term, when the FAA’s problems were well known, hiring and deployment of air traffic controllers actually shrank from the level during the Obama administration according to the DOT’s inspector general, to the point where staffing “could not keep pace with attrition.”

In the first budget he submitted after taking office in 2017, Trump proposed slashing the DOT budget by 13%. The budget plan called for cutting 30,000 workers from the FAA staff. The problems date back even further — at least to 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers at a single blow to break their union. A frenzy of hiring and training followed, but the replacement cohort has passed its retirement age. The FAA is currently about 3,000 controllers shy of its target staffing, so the people on the job are stretched to their breaking point.

It isn’t as if Trump and Duffy pulled out all the stops to fix the FAA’s chronic problems upon taking office. Some 3,000 “probationary” employees at the agency were fired during a DOGE rampage, according to a count by the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, the union representing safety and technical workers at the FAA, and a statement by Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), chair of the subcommittee overseeing the Transportation Department budget. The probationary firings and two subsequent rounds of buyouts will bring staffing at the DOT down by 12% since Trump took office.

During appearances last week before the House and Senate appropriations committees, Duffy boasted about saving taxpayers nearly $10 billion during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. That provoked Womack to riposte, “I think we need to be a little bit more precise in downsizing a department with a mission as critical as DOT’s. ... The question is pretty simple: How many departures can you handle without eroding the ability to carry out a safe and effective mission?”

“We can do more with less, Mr. Chairman,” Duffy replied. When staff accept buyout offers to retire or resign, he said, “we should take them up on that. ... If I have people who don’t want to be there, let’s get some people in who are hungry to do the work.” Indeed, after the first round of firings at the FAA, DOGE boss Elon Musk issued a public appeal that air traffic controllers who had “retired, but are open to returning to work, please consider doing so.” Furthermore, Trump’s freeze on disbursement of funds from Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act encompassed modernisation projects at airports nationwide. Musk’s fingerprints were also on the resignation of FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker, a former airline executive and former FAA deputy administrator who had been unanimously confirmed to a five-year term in October 2023. Whitaker resigned as of Jan. 20 after clashing with Musk over the FAA’s oversight of SpaceX, which Musk owns. Trump has nominated Republic Airways Chief Executive Bryan Bedford as his replacement, but Bedford hasn’t been confirmed.

During his Senate appropriations committee testimony on Thursday, Duffy maintained that his budget cuts and firings hadn’t compromised safety at all. He specifically denied that any air traffic controllers had been fired or offered buyouts.