Congress sent a six-month reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to President Trump on Thursday, September 29, 2017, passing a measure that also includes tax relief to areas affected by Hurricanes Maria, Harvey, and Irma. The Disaster Tax Relief and Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2017 (H.R. 3823) was passed by unanimous consent in both chambers allowing Congress to avoid a costly shutdown of the FAA.

The extension has very few substantive changes from the previous FAA authorization, but it serves to allow more time for debate on substantive policy changes including whether Air Traffic Control (ATC) should be privatized. The FAA is allowed to continue operating through March 31, 2018, under the current extension. This gives the House and Senate only about six months to work through various policy issues in the agency's full reauthorization.

While this legislation was considered by the House of Representatives earlier this week, it was brought to a vote with a Closed Rule - this means that the amendments the Quiet Skies sought to put forward could not be considered. This was done in order to expedite the process of passing the authorization in order to finish it by the September 30th deadline. It is likely that when a new reauthorization is considered and passed there will be more opportunities for amendments to the legislation.

Right now the primary roadblock to the new reauthorization is a disagreement between the House and the Senate as to if ATC should be privatized. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved the bill H.R. 2997 on June 27, 2017, which includes the provisions to spin off ATC into a nongovernmental entity. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) has been the biggest champion of this proposal. This legislation has yet to be approved by the full House, and there yet remains some internal disagreement over the proposal.

In a show of opposition, the House Appropriations Committee approved a spending bill for Fiscal Year 2018 during a full committee markup on July 17, 2017, by a vote of 31-20. The bill opposes the proposal to privatize ATC and would add $1 billion to the NextGen program for the purpose of modernizing ATC within the Federal Aviation Administration.

This creates a division in the House Majority over the ATC privatization proposal.

In the Senate, Chairman John Thune (R-SD) of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation released his own, more traditional FAA reauthorization, (S. 1405) that would keep ATC under the purview of the FAA. The measure passed in the Senate Committee on a voice vote but has yet to be considered by the full Senate. Any proposal to rework ATC would face an even higher threshold in the Senate as it would require bipartisan support of 60 votes to advance.

We will be sure to keep updating N.O.I.S.E. members on developments