Republican lawmakers say they want Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to deliver more details about his $30 billion-plus plan to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system before they will provide another funding tranche for the project.
Duffy’s plan appears to have bipartisan support, but a handful of Republicans said in interviews last week that the Federal Aviation Administration’s decadeslong struggle to implement its NextGen overhaul of aviation navigation, a similar multibillion-dollar undertaking to transform air traffic control, is driving apprehension about immediately providing more cash for such an overhaul.
“It’s comedic to watch how this federal government goes through money on someone’s latest, greatest idea, and then it’s obsolete before you can ever end up spending money to sustain your legacy systems,” said House Transportation-HUD Appropriations Chairman Steve Womack, R-Ark. “We need to see the plan. We need to see what the milestones are and what the benchmarks for funding are going to need to be as we build this thing out. And we ought to be able to do this in less than five years.”
