Should government be able to privatize functions
of agencies that are considered an essential service? Privatization has been en
vogue for quite some time now with everything from Social Security to incarcerating
inmates suggested as a method to shrink the size of government, lowering the
tax burden on businesses and high net worth individuals. Whenever politicians
gather and plan budgets, they work from the premise that all government is bad,
providing nothing that private enterprise/free market cannot do better. My contention is government is not a business
and as such, should not be run like one. Government exists for the good of
every citizen and the idea of winners and losers, profit and loss, surpluses
and balanced budgets while desirous in a business have no place in the
operating of our democracy.
The Trump administration recently
launched “Infrastructure Week” attempting to steer a series of programs through
congress with the intent of getting Americans back to work- rebuilding what the
President described as our nation’s “third world infrastructure” (@CNNPolitics
“President
Trump compares the US infrastructure to that of a ‘third-world country’"
Twitter, 15 August 2017 https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/897590249928437760)
The first program proposed was privatizing Air Traffic Control, wresting the
system from control of the Federal Aviation Administration division of the
Department of Transportation. This has
been proffered a number of times starting with the Reagan administration and
has been revisited by every administration since.
Air Transportation contributes 5.1% to
the US gross domestic product moving 2,586,582 domestic/international passengers
a year on 26,527 average daily scheduled flights. Close to 40 billion pounds of freight were
carried in 2016 and the annual earnings in aviation jobs runs $446.8 billion
(“Air
Traffic By the Numbers” Federal Aviation Administration https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/
Accessed 2 September 2017)
Many of the complaints about the FAA
and their stewardship of Air Traffic control stem from the way the government currently
funds the agency. The FAA has been subject to the budget/spending cap tug of
war that has been occurring over the past several years. Since sequestration starting
in 2013 the agencies budget has remained flat receiving funding from a series
of short term spending bills rather than a proper budget. Keeping up an
ever-expanding amount of air traffic, implementing next generation air traffic
control technologies, serving as the nations aviation regulator by both codifying
the rules and ensuring their compliance, are all agency functions. These
essential services require a stable budget with regular moderate increases to
accommodate an ever-expanding purview. (“Privatizing Air Traffic Control”
Aerospace America Debra Werner June 2017 https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/privatizing-air-traffic-control/
Retrieved 2 September 2017) This is a typical
strategy used often by congress, creating situations where they defund an
essential service then announce to the nation how the agency providing the
service is going under and needs to be disbanded, broken up and sold to the
private sector.
With all
that at stake I believe that privatizing Air Traffic Control is a bad idea. Now
my free market friends will tell me that the market and competition will cull
the overly expensive and inefficient from the field and provide better service
than any government entity, but in this case the proposal is to give control of
the nation's air traffic to a private non profit corporation, founded just for
this purpose. The fallacy of the free market/competition argument is the plan
doesn't create multiple companies to run ATC, who will then compete for and win
our business. Rather it creates just one, who will then be awarded the best
system globally which handles more traffic safely than any other country in the
world.
Under HR2997 the house bill that removes
ATC from the FAA, the non-profit will have a board of directors composed of 13
members, with representation from each of the stakeholders in aviation. The
airlines and their employee unions will have four seats on the board. Hub
airports and the Air Traffic Control unions will also be equally represented
with General Aviation, or the private sector, receiving just two seats. Many
have concerns that the airlines, their labor unions, the ATC unions and hub
airports whose interests are closely aligned will band together effectively
ceding the nations air traffic control system to the airlines. All of the big
three airlines have undergone reorganization via bankruptcy several times over
the past few decades, while ATC has shouldered its duties through boom or bust. (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association “ATC
Privatization Pitfalls Point By Point” 12 July 2017 Joe Kilda Aircraft Owners
and Pilots Association https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/july/12/get-the-facts-about-atc-privatization)
We've gone down this privatization road before, just a short time ago
with the FAA spinning off the Flight Service Stations to a private contractor.
We were promised that the acquisition of these services by one of the country's
leading defense contractors (Lockheed Martin) would greatly improve the service,
as the company would then modernize the product, bringing to bear all of the
conveyances of recent technology and delivery methods that the stodgy old
federal government could only dream about.
One of the first things they accomplished was the closing and consolidation of
these government weather stations and reporting service facilities into just a
few, located on either side of the continent. The employees were offered
continued employment but naturally they would have to move to these new
locations to keep their jobs
The change was rolled out in 2007 just before Airventure Oshkosh, the
Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual convention and the world’s largest gathering
of aviators in Wisconsin each year. Regulars like myself (I have attended
sixteen of the past seventeen years) witnessed the rollout in person as Lockheed
Martin personnel staffed the former FAA FSS offices and the trailers on the
show grounds, and in true trade-show fashion their facilities were replete with
swag emblazoned with their logo. Small bottles of hand sanitizer, and sun block
lip balms were all the rage as you waited for your briefing usually given by a
recently ex-federal employee who had neither the seniority to retire, nor deep
enough roots to keep them from relocating to D.C./Virginia or the Arizona
locations of the newly private enterprise.
What was telling to me was the briefers were using the same old
government web sites and government collected data that I used to formulate my
own picture of the weather. What
went missing was the local resident's perspective of the weather, the picture
and trends, nay insight, which made the service an invaluable safety component
of the preflight process for those of us lacking a dispatch department to determine
our routes around inclement weather. Soon thereafter with the budget
sequestration their presence at the show ended bringing to light that the service
wasn't donated and they weren't volunteers.
I stopped using them regularly after the color-coded terrorism alert
system came online. This had telephone preflight weather briefers more
concerned about whether I would pledge I had first received and then follow the
prerecorded security Notices to Airmen (NOTAMS) announced prior to even receiving
a briefing. As technology
advanced I started receiving my briefings electronically via a mélange of
different internet sources and when I started flying for a regional airline we
had dispatchers who can look at the weather and give advice as to which way to
turn. Similarly to the way Automated Teller Machines and Self Checkout lines at
the grocery stores kept you from dealing with the surly bank teller or the “cannot
make change without the register telling me what to give you” cashier, the poor
performance of the Lockheed Martin personnel drove most of the flying
population to use a source other than the privatized entity. This didn’t change
their contract however and they continued to serve a diminishing population of
pilots while receiving their agreed on rates.
Beyond the cost reduction that made the private entity product immensely
profitable, the effort yielded no tangible results except eliminating a
workforce of middle class union employees- always a priority to many of our
congressional members. The cost to the
government remained the same as services declined and Lockheed received a multi-year
contract extension after which they sold the business to another corporation
who has degraded the services even further as they provide “return on the
shareholder’s equity”
The difference between government agencies
and private corporations is that corporation’s by nature are sociopathic. A
corporation’s sole purpose in the world is to enrich the shareholder- everything
else is secondary. There isn’t anything wrong with this behavior, it is how
many successful businesses operate, but government cannot, existing to service
the entirety of its constituency. Essentially
when it comes to FAA/ATC, you can get your weather information from a multitude
of places -but you can't get Air Traffic Control from anyone but ATC. Let's not
make the same mistake in privatization by giving a national asset away to be
run like a business.
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