Aeropolitics_US: House Rules

US politicians of various stripes have spent years talking a strong game about modernizing the country’s ground-based air traffic control system. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a Republican and a Democrat, both embraced moving to a satellite-based NextGen system and directed their transportation secretaries to make a concerted public push. Members of Congress of both parties who have engaged in the issue, whether from crowded metropolitan areas or rural communities, generally have stuck to the line that upgrading ATC is critical for development of the US air transport industry specifically and the economy more generally.

“NextGen is a very high priority,” Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said in February. “We have to have it. In some ways our cars are more up to date than our planes. We believe in NextGen. We believe it is the future, not just for efficiency but for safety.”

But while there has been some progress in laying the technological foundation for NextGen, US lawmakers have spent the last several years unsuccessfully negotiating over how to pay for a modernization that is estimated to carry a combined government/industry price tag of upwards of $50 billion. With the effort to reauthorize FAA, and thus establish a long-term strategy for the agency, stalled in Congress since 2007, there has been no clear guidance from the federal government on NextGen funding mechanisms or when the ATC upgrade will begin paying dividends. Most US airlines, as a result, have been reluctant to make what LaHood concedes is a “hard call” to pony up a “significant upfront investment” in expensive NextGen-capable cockpit equipment.

The question, with Republicans officially taking control of the House of Representatives in January following last November’s landslide victory in Congressional elections, is whether Washington pols waited too long to lock in long-term NextGen financing. There are 85 new GOP members in the House, including 19 on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and many of them fervently believe their election victory can be attributed to a sweeping sentiment across the US that federal spending is out of control and the country’s growing debt must be attacked.

In addition, Dept. of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel in late December said FAA “faces several organizational, policy, logistical and training challenges” in implementing NextGen. He noted that in order successfully to establish the high-tech ATC system, “FAA will have to effectively work across diverse agency lines of business—including its Aircraft Certification Service, Flight Standards Service and Air Traffic Organization—which it has not done effectively in the past.”

Lawmakers making yet another attempt this year to pass FAA reauthorization legislation, and also to devise budgets for federal departments such as Transportation and Homeland Security, find themselves in a much-changed political environment. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) last month proposed cutting DOT’s budget by 17% for the remainder of the US government’s current fiscal year ending Sept. 30, with steeper cuts expected in House Republican budget proposals for FY2012 starting Oct. 1. While it is true Democrats still control the White House and the Senate, no legislation can be passed without the acquiescence of the House, where Republicans enjoy a formidable 241-193 edge. And even many liberal Democrats are openly acknowledging that the US’s fiscal books are out of whack.

‘Grim Reaper’ 

“Don’t mean to be the grim reaper here, but it’s going to be tough for everybody,” Jim Coon, staff director of the Republican-controlled House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told a gathering of US airport executives, many of whom count on the federal government for financial assistance on costly expansion projects, last month in Washington. The new House majority was “elected to reduce spending, reduce the size of government,” he explained. “We all need to think what we can do differently, [such as getting] private-public partnerships involved in aviation, because the federal government can’t afford to continue spending money it doesn’t have.”

That means that a whole host of things concerning the air transportation industry, from ATC modernization to airport security to passenger facility charge rates to Essential Air Service subsidies, will come under the microscope. The political atmosphere in Washington is “pressurized,” Rachel Milberg, a Congressional staffer working on transportation appropriations for the Senate’s Democratic majority, told the American Assn. of Airport Executives/Airports Council International-North America Washington Legislative Conference in February.

“There’s a lot of pressure to cut spending and this is about now, 2011, not debating future spending,” she explained. “[There is] almost a competition for how much you can cut at one time. The same pressure that’s operating in the House is also operating on the Senate side. It’s a Democratic majority, but a small majority [53-47], and many Senate Democrats are also fiscally conservative and want to cut spending.”

ACI-NA VP-Government Affairs Jane Calderwood tells ATW, “A lot of the new members have come to reduce the size of the federalgovernment and the cost, and lower the regulatory burden. How is this going to play out? . . . Some will stay on the path that got them elected while some, as they get down into the issues and listen to their constituents, I assume will moderate [and] pick and choose what [federal programs are] important to them and their states. But others may go further down [the cost-cutting] path that got them elected. That’s going to be the story of the first year of this Congress: There’s this huge new group [the largest ‘freshman class’ since 1939] and nobody knows what they’re going to do.”

Defending FAA 

Federal Aviation Administrator Randy Babbitt’s official job is to provide oversight of the day-to-day running of the agency he leads, but with the seating of the 112th Congress in January the onetime Eastern Airlines pilot quickly has added a new role to his portfolio: Chief defender of the agency and its wide-ranging responsibilities, explaining to the public and Congress that money allocated to FAA is not spending the country can do without.

“I think we need to continue our [federal] investments in airports because they are economic engines,” he told ATW. “And no one would suggest that we should have less robust safety enforcement.” With regard to federal spending on ATC modernization, he argues that “any corporate board would look at the benefits of NextGen and say, ‘That’s something to invest in.’ Another thing we do is approve a lot of products [made by aircraft OEMs and component providers] and projects [such as airport expansion proposals and technology development/demonstration] and I wouldn’t want to slow that down because those things create jobs and foster innovation.”

Babbitt made those comments in early February at Washington National Airport shortly after announcing that FAA will spend $4.2 million over the next two years to equip 35 JetBlue Airways A320s with ACSS’s SafeRoute ADS-B equipment, enabling the LCC to operate “more precise, satellite-based flights from Boston and New York [JFK] to Florida and the Caribbean” starting in 2012. In return, the airline agreed to cover maintenance costs on the equipment and to share with FAA detailed data on flight operations.

Babbitt said JetBlue’s operating GPS-guided revenue flights will serve as “proof of concept” for NextGen. “JetBlue is going to share with us the data that will give us the details on where, how and why NextGen is saving time and fuel,” he explained.

The project with the LCC is noteworthy considering that aircraft equipage costs have been one of the main points of friction between the airline industry and the federal government regarding NextGen. With some high-profile exceptions (Alaska Airlines, Southwest Airlines and UPS Airlines), US carriers generally have expressed skepticism about spending millions of dollars equipping aircraft when NextGen’s potential benefits are still somewhat in the abstract. The US Air Transport Assn. declined a request to comment for this article.

Babbitt noted that additional funding is available for aircraft equipage on a similar scale to the JetBlue program but indicated that the industry will have to cover most of the bill. JetBlue’s successful use of ADS-B equipment will “help confirm [benefits] to others that are reluctant to invest,” he asserted.

Reauthorization Stalled 

Of course a long-term FAA reauthorization law that clearly set out NextGen priorities and timelines, and established a path to pay for the ATC upgrade, would be a big help to Babbitt’s effort to convince airlines to spend money to equip cockpits. The agency’s authorization officially expired on Sept. 30, 2007, and for more than three years it has operated via a series of 17 temporary funding extensions cleared by Congress. The controversies that have sunk reauthorization have been numerous and, in many cases, have cut across party lines.

The Senate actually made consideration of FAA reauthorization its first order of business in the new Congress, with Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) essentially reintroducing last month the two-year, $34.5 billion bill the chamber passed last year.

But the early February Senate floor debate on FAA reauthorization immediately got caught up in the general political debate in Washington, with senators proposing a variety of amendments. Some were connected to aviation: Former presidential candidate John McCain (R-Ariz.) proposed cutting the $200 million Essential Air Service program created when the industry was deregulated more than 30 years ago, which subsidizes airline flights to rural communities. He said lawmakers “serious” about lowering spending will support EAS elimination. Other amendments were unrelated to aviation altogether, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) attaching to the bill a repeal of the health care reform law passed last spring.

On the House side, Republicans now in control have vowed to move forward with urgency on FAA reauthorization. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee unveiled a four-year, $59.7 billion FAA reauthorization bill in mid-February. “This is a lean bill that recognizes our current budgetary difficulties and the need to do more with less,” T&I Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) said, adding that the proposed legislation “saves $4 billion” from current funding levels. It would require FAA “to identify significant cost savings, while ensuring that cuts are not made to safety critical activities.”

He pointed out that the proposal jettisons provisions that proved controversial in the FAA reauthorization bill passed by the House in 2009 and championed by former T&I Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn.), who lost his seat in last November’s Congressional elections. For example, the new bill does not call for airline alliance antitrust immunity to expire every three years or for FedEx’s status under labor law to change. But the Mica-led bill is not without provisions likely to spark strong debate. For one, it proposes phasing out the EAS program.

The latest temporary FAA funding extension expires March 31, and it is unclear whether both the House and Senate can by then pass their own bills, reconcile the differences and approve a unified bill for President Obama to sign into law. Many following the issue believe at least one more extension is likely.

Calderwood says the short-term extensions have caused considerable angst among publicly owned and operated US airports that count on FAA programs, such as the Airport Improvement Program, to provide grants for construction projects. “It’s hard to plan because in some cases FAA is only able to address your issue [under the assumption] they only have three months worth of funding,” she explains. “While [FAA believes] that Congress will extend it again, you can’t take that to the bank, you can’t take that to the construction crew you’ve got waiting to finish your runway or redo your taxiway.”

While reauthorizing FAA tops Mica’s agenda, streamlining the Transportation Security Administration is also on his radar. He was aviation subcommittee chairman when TSA was established by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11 and played a large role in drafting the legislation mandating the federal takeover of airport security. Coon said Mica “commonly refers to [TSA] as his ‘little bastard’ . . .  It was never the intent of Congress to create a bureaucracy that has gone from 14,000 employees to more than 60,000
 . . . We’re spending billions and billions of dollars on something that I’m not sure is working as it should.”

In a recent guest editorial in the Orlando Sentinel,Mica charged that TSA “has become a bloated, poorly focused and top-heavy bureaucracy . . . TSA administrative staff [in 2010 included] 3,680 individuals making an average salary of $105,000 per year. Another 8,000-plus administrative positions have been created across the country.”

The congressman was particularly irked when TSA head John Pistole issued an order last month potentially permitting airport screeners to unionize. That move came shortly after TSA said it would not allow any more airports to opt out of federal screening in favor of using certified private screeners under government supervision and oversight.

In a blistering statement, Mica called the moves “all bad news for the traveler, the taxpayer and aviation security” and “President Obama’s biggest gift to organized labor.” With such rhetoric flying, compromises on aviation-related issues may be hard to come by.