The air traffic control system should not be affected by which politicians are in power or how much money Congress decides to spend on it.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is “clapping back” at former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg over air traffic control.

Buttigieg posted on X, “The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?”

Duffy replied with a longer post that began, “Mayor Pete failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system.” He said fewer than 400 of the FAA’s 45,000 employees were fired, all of them were hired less than a year ago, and none of them were air traffic controllers. “When we finally get a full accounting of his mismanagement, I look forward to hearing from him,” Duffy said.

Duffy has the better end of the argument here. Buttigieg was wrong to insinuate that air travel safety has been affected by the firing of bureaucrats, and the DOT under his watch was primarily occupied with doling out wasteful “infrastructure” spending.

But it is a bit unseemly for the secretary of transportation and his predecessor to be bickering with each other online about something as vital as air traffic control. There’s a ready solution to this problem, one that DOGE should be interested in: Get the federal government out of air traffic control.

I’d call it “privatizing,” but if you want to call it “depoliticizing” air traffic control, that’s fine by me. The air traffic control system should not be affected in the slightest by which politicians are in power or how much money Congress decides to spend on it.

Air traffic control is not a public good in economic theory. It’s a club good, which means it can be provided privately through a system of user fees. The government has not done a good job overall of modernizing the system, a problem going back decades under administrations of both parties, so there’s good reason to desire a better alternative. And Canada illustrates that the private alternative works: Canadian air traffic control has been provided by a nonprofit since 1996, at zero cost to Canadian taxpayers.

Rather than persisting with the self-described “World War II-era air traffic control system” run by the federal government, Duffy should call for faster modernization with private money along the lines of the Canadian nonprofit model. Privatization has been proposed for the U.S. on and off since the 1980s, so DOT doesn’t need to come up with any groundbreaking ideas or ask for more money from Congress. In fact, it would be a great achievement for Duffy to be able to say he was the last secretary of transportation to ever ask Congress to fund air traffic control at all.