Lessons From the Newark Debacle

Maybe government does something useful

I did something either brave or foolish last week. I was booked on a flight from Amsterdam to Newark, and decided to ignore advice from friends urging me to rebook on a plane heading someplace else. And a strange thing happened: my flight arrived right on schedule.

Obviously thousands of flyers have been having very different experiences in recent weeks, and air traffic control at Newark remains a mess. So what can we learn from the debacle?

I’d like to blame Elon Musk and say that all those delayed travelers have been DOGEd. Sadly, the problems at Newark, and with air traffic control in general, have been building for many months. So you can’t blame this problem on the Muskenjugend — the tech bros barely old enough to shave that DOGE has parachuted into many government agencies — even though they are indeed wreaking havoc and will be responsible for many future debacles.

That said, the Newark mess is an object lesson in what’s wrong with DOGE and right-wing views of government in general.

The proximate causes of the current crisis, as I understand it, go like this: The Federal Aviation Administration as a whole is severely understaffed, with a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers in particular, as well as relying on antiquated equipment — we’re talking Windows 95 and floppy disks. Recruiting controllers for the New York area has been especially hard because of the high cost of living (which is mainly about housing.) In an effort to improve recruitment, the FAA moved traffic control to Philadelphia, where the cost of living is substantially lower.

But many controllers refused to make the move, and the technology side of the transition was botched — apparently the Philadelphia center’s jerry-rigged link to radar and communications keeps going down, and some of the controllers in Philadelphia have been so traumatized that they have exercised their right to take leaves of absence, worsening the staff crisis.

Ordinarily I’d say that we’ll eventually have the full story of what went wrong and find ways to fix it. But maybe not. Do you trust Trump administration officials to conduct a full and honest inquiry rather than look for ways to blame the Biden administration and/or the traffic controllers? Do you trust them to look for real solutions rather than justifications for privatization and sweetheart contracts for supporters?

I was struck by Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, declaring that “patriotic controllers are going to stay on and continue to serve the country.” This from an administration that has taken self-dealing to levels unimagined in our nation’s history.

But back to DOGE and all that. The whole premise underlying Muskification is that much of the federal workforce is deadwood — legions of overpaid bureaucrats pushing paper around without doing anything useful. In reality, however, many federal workers are like air traffic controllers — doing jobs that are essential to keeping the economy and normal life in general proceeding smoothly. And while the air traffic controller shortage is probably (I hope!) exceptionally severe, the federal bureaucracy is in general stretched thin after decades of anti-government rhetoric that have left federal employment as a share of total employment far below historical levels:

And if you’re wondering why the government is having trouble recruiting enough traffic controllers, you should know that the Congressional Budget Office has found that highly educated federal workers are, on average, paid less than equivalent workers in the private sector. Workers with a doctorate or professional degree are paid 29 percent less than their private-sector counterparts:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

And this gap has widened in recent years, because Congress has capped federal salary increases.

This matches my personal observation. The federal workers I know tend to be in economics or finance-related jobs, and they earn less — sometimes far less — than they could make if they went to Wall Street.

Why, then, do highly educated Americans even take federal jobs? CBO stresses job security, which has indeed historically been higher for federal workers than their private-sector counterparts. I would also say, based on those I know, that meaning is a factor. At least some high-level federal workers accept lower pay than they could make elsewhere because they feel that they’re doing something that matters. No doubt that’s only a relatively small subset of the federal work force, but it’s surely an important subset, people who are doing especially crucial jobs.

But that was the way things used to be. How much job security can high-level federal workers feel when they never know when they’ll be DOGEd — abruptly fired without notice, locked out of their offices and even their email accounts? How much pride can they take in their work when their political masters never miss a chance to say that they’re worthless (unless there’s a crisis, in which case it becomes their patriotic duty to stay on the job?).

So my prediction is that the air traffic control crisis is the shape of things to come. In a matter of months Trump, Musk and company have severely degraded the morale and, eventually, the quality of the federal work force. And the result will be many more debacles.

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