Trump’s Infrastructure Plan to Privatize Air Traffic Control

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump called for a government investment of $1 trillion into the nation’s infrastructure. He has now released the overview of a plan that would privatize and modernize the air-traffic control system of the country, placing the bulk of infrastructure costs on states, cities, and corporations rather than the federal government, and reduce the time it took takes to get a building permit from ten years to two.

The details of the plan are weeks if not months from completion despite remarks that President Trump made in April in an interview with CBS News where he claimed the infrastructure bill was, “largely completed, and we’ll be filing over the next two or three weeks, maybe sooner.” The administration has blamed the delay on Congress stating that they did not want to send the bill into Congress before senators had passed legislation on health care and the national budget.

The administration hopes to create millions of jobs from this infrastructure plan and believes that shifting the bulk of the financing for these projects from the government to private industry, state taxes, and city taxes they will be helping taxpayers by “not using taxpayer dollars to give taxpayer wins”, according to Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council.  

Sarah Feinberg, former senior official at the Transportation Department under the Obama administration, criticizes the plan,“Mr. Trump’s budget proposal to spend $200 billion in the next 10 years falls short of what is needed. The idea that this really minimal amount of federal investment will spur that level of private investment is hopeful but not realistic.” This criticism is likely to be echoed by Democrats when the bill is released to Congress.

This infrastructure bill comes at a difficult time for the administration. Their first attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act was unpopular and a planned vote was called off, Trump’s tax cut plan was criticized for being a page long and not detailing any specifics, and the President has recently decided to pull out of the Paris climate agreement which has put him under scrutiny from executives, senators, and countries around the world.

Trump’s plan to cut permitting requirements so that the process is moved from a ten year pace to two years has been received positively as many construction and finance companies have been disheartened in infrastructure projects in the past because of the costly and time consuming process.
Trump’s privatization of air traffic control has been met with a mixture of support and criticism. Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio believes the plan would “cater to large airlines at the expense of smaller operators.” However, Jonathan Root, a senior officer for the credit rating agency Moody’s, says, “the expectation is that a private organization will complete modernization much quicker than if it remains with the F.A.A.” The Trump administration also released a statement saying that they do not anticipate higher airline user fees or ticket prices due to the privatization of air-traffic. Thom Metzger, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, supports the idea of modernization so long as the privatization is done by a nonprofit entity.

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