The following is adapted from Karl Zinsmeister’s new book, My West Wing: A Very Personal Account of Work in the White House … and Solving Washington’s Perpetual Resistance to Reform.
In late January of this year, an American Airlines jet landing at our nation’s capital smashed into an Army helicopter that had floated into its flight path. All 67 people aboard the two craft were killed.
Four more fatal air crashes and hundreds of close calls requiring emergency interventions took place across the country in the weeks following. By the end of the first 60 days of 2025, there had been 100 dangerous aviation incidents in the U.S. While a deadlier-than-normal period, that was actually fewer near misses than take place over a similar period in a typical year. We are enduring more peril in the air than we ought to. And many of these calamities and close calls are needless — stemming from the failure of our federal government to maintain a modern air traffic control system.
When you walk into the Federal Aviation Administration’s control towers, you enter a time warp. You will encounter green screens, vacuum tubes, floppy disks, and hand-cued radio transmitters that belong in museums. Controllers squint through binoculars to monitor dangers. Some FAA radar stations sit where they do because that’s where bonfires were kept burning during the early days when all flight was visual.
Normal private cars on U.S. roads are literally navigating with greater GPS-linked sophistication than our multimillion-dollar airliners packed full of men, women, and children. Decades past the moment when transponders and computers could keep airliners automatically and effortlessly separated at safe distances, we still have government employees staring at fuzzy two-dimensional screens and then clicking on scratchy radios to tell pilots orally where they must move to avoid deadly collisions.
The combination of these antique methods of navigation with increasingly crowded skies means today’s controllers and pilots must exchange information with terrifying speed and brevity. The opportunities for not noticing something, misspeaking or mishearing, being confused by an accent or static, or simply failing to pick up on an order or visual clue, are constant. Outdated air-traffic management leaves no buffer for mistakes such as those made by the Army helicopter pilot. And so the world exploded for 67 Americans.
Network failure and human error mix in our towers and cockpits much more than they should. On Feb. 25, it was only a pilot’s emergency improvisation that prevented mass casualties. A Boeing airliner with 142 people on board was a second or two from touching its wheels to the ground in Chicago when a private jet taxied right across its runway, just a few plane lengths ahead. The Boeing pilot pulled sharply up and passed over the other aircraft.
An inquiry found that sun glare prevented the private jet from seeing that it was pulling right into the path of another plane. But the fundamental problem was the outdated visual and oral, rather than electronic, systems we still rely on. The air traffic controller gave the private jet these instructions: “Turn left onto runway 04L, cross runway 31L, and then hold short of runway 31C.” A earful to catch under pressure, to be sure. And amid the complicated pathways and paint striping on the tarmac, the private pilot lost track of where the taxiways turn into runways. (Imagine the additional complication when Chicago snow covers the ground.) Instead of holding short of runway 31C as instructed, the little jet rolled right into the path of the large airliner.
For more than a generation, we have had the technology to avoid these kinds of dangers. What keeps us in the dark ages is not physics or economics but simply government bureaucracy and interest-group politics — footdragging by unions, selfish lobbying by private plane owners, airlines demanding the feds pay for putting the transponders into their planes, elected officials who block closures of outdated FAA facilities, and more.
I’m sure some readers right now must be thinking: Operational failure is what happens when the federal government starves an agency for funding. If we’d just give the poor FAA the money it deserves, things would be fine. Wrong. The final year I worked in the White House, 2008, the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration was $14 billion. By 2025, it was receiving $27 billion. A lack of money is not its problem.
Our air traffic control system is just a mismanaged dinosaur. Thanks to the sheer proficiency of America’s pilots and controller corps, we get lucky most years and avoid fiery deaths. But that’s no credit to the laggard aviation institutions run by our federal government.
And safety is not the only penalty we pay for bad federal management of air traffic control. In 2024, fully 37% of all U.S. scheduled airline flights were delayed or cancelled. The result is billions of wasted travel hours, wrecked business meetings, missed funerals, huge quantities of jet fuel squandered by planes idling on the tarmac, and so forth.
When I first encountered the mismanagement and technical obsolescence of the FAA during my time serving as chief domestic policy adviser in the White House, I launched serious efforts aiming to prod and drag the agency into the 21st century. A small technical squad I assembled with the secretary of transportation worked hard for months to come up with innovative methods of reducing air congestion.
But the Washington Blob struck back — denying, delaying, resisting, finally filing lawsuits to block and undo our reforms. (Details are in my new book, My West Wing.) This experience was a crystal-clear demonstration of the ways that federal bureaucracies and special interests stubbornly block sensible reforms. So as I observed the latest string of air debacles this year, my blood pressure spiked. I know from first-hand experience how needless our flight messes and dangers really are.
And the FAA is just one example among hundreds. The federal establishment’s truculent resistance to reform was the first thing that hit me in the face when I worked in the White House. Protectors of the status quo were entrenched and immoveable in agency after agency, smugly certain they could fend off change agents simply by outwaiting them.
That is how our national arteries became dangerously clogged. And that is why the American public is willing to tolerate some rough water today while dramatic efforts are made to undo federal sclerosis. Many of us who have experience with kinder, gentler, more incremental efforts to fix the Washington bureaucracy have concluded that today’s disrupt-and-rebuild method is our best chance for making our runaway government more rational and responsive.
POTOMAC PLANE CRASH CAUSED BY PILOT, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER ERROR: INVESTIGATION
When I left my White House service in 2009, the federal government was spending $3 trillion a year. It was not a lean or clean operation then. Today, that same federal apparatus has bloated to over $7 trillion, and there has been a corollary increase in the arrogance and intransigence of federal operatives.
Washington’s perpetual resistance to reform has given public-spirited people no choice. There’s no avoiding a teardown.
Karl Zinsmeister was chief domestic policy adviser in the White House from 2006 to 2009 and is author of My West Wing.