WHAT'LL WE DO WITHOUT PATCO?

Congress and Bush Split on Privatizing at F.A.A. (MATTHEW L. WALD, 6/20/03, NY Times)

Air traffic control has become a flashpoint of the Bush administration's effort to contract out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to the private sector.

Both the House and Senate voted last week to forbid further privatization of the air traffic system, after vigorous lobbying by the controllers' unions, supported by a group representing private pilots. Soon, negotiators for the two houses will iron out differences in the bill to which the measures were attached. The underlying bill authorizes the Federal Aviation Administration to spend money for the next few years; the House version is for $58.9 billion over four years, and the Senate version is for $43.5 billion over three years.

The administration is threatening to veto the bill over the privatization provision. On June 11, it announced that "restrictions are unnecessary and would hinder" the ability of the aviation agency to manage the air traffic control system. In May, the administration said that of 850,000 government jobs that it says could be handled by private contractors, it would like to open 15 percent of them to private-sector competition in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Officials have said they would like to find some of those jobs at the F.A.A.

More than 200 airports, mostly small, already have "contract towers" with privately employed air traffic controllers, and as the aviation agency has bought new air traffic computers, it has bought maintenance contracts on some of that equipment from the vendors, rather than using its own technicians.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton declared that the air traffic function was "inherently governmental," but last year, the Bush administration reversed that position.

The point of privatizing the FAA is in large part that the prime example statists always use when they want to show that we all depend on
big government is: "Would you fly if there were no air traffic controllers?" [The other favorite is meat inspectors, with student loans and mortgages in a tie for third.] The belief that but for government actions there would be no air travel, safe meat, college attendance and home ownership is symptomatic of the way dependence on government has corrupted the American mind. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2003 11:14 AM