The conventional wisdom holds that an administrative state made up of professional government functionaries will run well in spite of the constant political changes that most free countries expect every four or five or six years. Institutional knowledge, subject-matter expertise, and a non-partisan mindset should make the day-to-day function of government a process, rather than a political minefield.
It very obviously does not work that way. The administrative state in America has morphed into the Deep StateTM, or maybe it was always that way and it took many years for it to destroy even a semblance of competence.
Add in the catastrophically inefficient, labyrinthine process that our modern government does anything, and we have a reasonable explanation for the absolute mess that the FAA has made of our air traffic control system...over 40 years!
FAA Plans to Hire Nearly 9,000 Air Traffic Controllers by 2028 Amid Nationwide Shortage
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Aug. 7 unveiled updated plans to hire thousands of air traffic controllers by the end of the year, and nearly 9,000 by 2028, as the agency looks to dig itself out of a now decades-long shortage of workers who are among the most critical for aviation safety.
The FAA has been beset by a decades-long shortage of air traffic controllers, who are critical for directing and overseeing air traffic in and out of the nations busiest and most congested air spaces.
The issue dates to 1981, when then-President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who were on strike, viewing it as an illegal strike. Months later, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) decertified the only existing air traffic controller union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), which was the first time in history that a national union was decertified.
For f*ck's sake...they still use floppy disks and CDs! And I am confident that the rest of the technology in our airport control centers is just as old.
So why did this happen? The short answer is that they just don't give a sh*t, and care more about their pensions than their responsibilities to the people of the United States of America. The longer answer is that the administrative state does not have any market pressures to excel, and no penalties for failure. Congressmen move on, senators get bored, and their high profile hearings about the sorry state of the FAA or the DoD or the department flavor of the month gets subsumed in the next news cycle. So nobody is held accountable over the years, and the institutional rot caused by lack of accountability is built into the process.
How to fix it? Decertify every government union. Employment must be at will. Make the compensation of all managers dependent on the successful and timely completion of capital projects. Do yearly evaluations with the expectation that people will get fired. And every one of us who has ever worked for any sort of large company recognizes that as business-as-usual!
The trick is to get Congress to go along, and that will have to wait until the House of Representatives actually represents Americans, rather than 20,000,000 wetbacks and gerrymandered districts.
Hopefully President Vance's second term will be calm enough that he can focus on the total restructuring of our civil service!