Dismantling FAA's Safety & Public Role: Project 2025's Aviation Privatization Blueprint
Project 2025 proposes to separate the FAA from DOT, end the Essential Air Service subsidy, slash the 1,500-hour copilot rule, and shift FAA R&D to private certification. These moves would shrink safety oversight, strand rural airports, and accelerate a pilot shortage crisis, all while treating aviation like a deregulated business rather than a public utility.
The FAA is not a broken business—it is a public safety agency that ensures every takeoff, landing, and air traffic instruction protects 2.5 million passengers daily. Project 2025 treats it as a cost center to be privatized, starting with a proposal to separate the Air Traffic Organization from the FAA. This would fragment accountability: one entity managing safety regulation, another managing traffic—exactly the opposite of what near-miss incidents and runway incursions demand. Independent air navigation service providers in Canada and the UK have brought efficiency, but they also operate under robust safety mandates and user-fee structures that can increase costs for small carriers. The U.S. system, though flawed, keeps safety certification and ATC under one roof. Splitting them invites coordination failures and undermines the very safety culture that makes U.S. aviation the world's benchmark.
Ending the Essential Air Service (EAS) program—a 1970s deregulation cushion now serving 200 small airports—would strand communities in rural and red states where commercial air travel is not otherwise viable. The claim that it 'frees pilots' for larger markets ignores that EAS carriers often use separate aircraft and crews; pushing them out of business doesn't magically add pilots to Delta or United. Similarly, weakening the 1,500-hour rule for copilots, justified by a 'pilot shortage,' is a false trade-off. The rule was enacted after the Colgan Air crash killed 50 people; it exists to ensure that even the most junior crewmember has real-world experience. Cutting it would not fix the shortage (which stems from retirements and training bottlenecks) but would reintroduce the exact risk that killed passengers in 2009.
As of this writing, the administration has not yet moved to separate the FAA from DOT or end EAS—these remain proposals. The FAA continues to certify new technologies like drones and advanced air mobility through existing R&D pathways. The fight is to prevent the hollowing out of safety standards and rural access. The alternative is straightforward: keep EAS funded and reform it to support sustainable air service (e.g., subsidizing small aircraft with Part 135 operators), modernize the FAA's certification process without privatizing safety, and address the pilot shortage by expanding training partnerships and veteran-to-pilot pipelines, not by lowering the bar. Safe streets and reliable transit don't stop at the airport curb—they connect to it.
Grounded in
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 21: Department of Commerce (pp 664-666)"— 631 — Department of Transportation are providing access to capital to foreign airlines for innovations and new equipment purchases that U.S. airlines cannot match. The U.S. should use the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) process to keep out nefarious foreign actors while allowing investment from investors in designated like-minded countries so long as U.S.-based investors maintain plurality ownership. l Establish a New Entry Initiative that commits the federal government to approving or rejecting the applications of new air carriers within 12 months. l Initiate a rulemaking to allocate slot-pairs more consistently to airlines at capacity-controlled airports on the primary basis of safety, maximizing capacity, and competition. In a perfect world, the market would dictate these options, but in the highly regulated international aviation sector, the current incentives are to keep out com- petitors. Slot regulations have not been updated since the 1990s. Well-meaning legislation and the pilot shortage are adversely affecting aviation safety. In the wake of the 2009 Colgan Airlines crash, all commercial pilots and copilots were required to h…"