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For the first time since 9/11, all U.S. flights were grounded early Wednesday.
Public officials said the failure stemmed from the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM system, which pilots use to access flight plans. The outage caused at least 5,400 U.S. flight delays and tens of thousands of early-rising passengers to miss connecting flights.
While there was initial speculation that the system outage stemmed from a cyberattack, it turns out the explanation was much simpler: there was a computer "glitch."
The episode left the Federal Aviation Administration—the largest U.S. transportation agency in terms of staff—with egg on its face.
"The FAA...has fallen off the trolley in terms of keeping up their systems," Michael Boyd, chairman of aviation research company the Boyd Group, told CNBC's Squawk Box.
The FAA falls under the purview of the Department of Transportation, headed by Pete Buttigieg, who ordered an "after-action process" in the wake of the debacle.
The timing could not be worse for Buttigieg. The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor's tenure has been plagued by transportation woes and labor headaches. These include a meltdown over the holidays that saw 15,000 flights canceled in the space of a week, as well as a contract dispute with railroad workers that nearly led to a strike (while Buttigieg vacationed in Europe).
The latest mess has raised questions about the extent of Buttigieg's experience in aviation.
"There's no excuse for this," Boyd said. "We've got to find people who are qualified aviation-related people [to lead the FAA], not people who know people in Washington."
Buttigieg has no experience in aviation. And while this may frustrate people in the aviation sector, it's worth noting it is fairly typical of federal bureaucracies.
A 2015 paper written by Columbia University political scientists John D. Huber and Michael M. Ting notes that "patronage appointees" and "patronage jobs" are quite common across political systems. Patronage bureaucrats selected for political clout and personal favors (usually as a reward for their work in a past election or an incentive to help to secure a future one) tend to perform worse than typical bureaucrats, the authors said.
"Patronage-based bureaucrats typically lack the skills, experience and especially the incentives to produce public goods," Huber and Ting write. "Good governance requires good bureaucracy, where civil servants do the day-to-day work delivering the public goods that government can best provide. But in democracies, since politicians must worry about re-election and the policy consequences of losing, they often lack incentives to create good bureaucracy."
It's hard to find a better example of patronage than Buttigieg, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential election two days before Super Tuesday, "opening up a wider path for former Vice President Joe Biden to become the moderate alternative to Bernie Sanders," in the words of Politico. Buttigieg had no realistic chance of securing the Democratic nomination for president, but following his departure from the race, CNN noted he may have secured "a possible Cabinet position in a Democratic administration."
As a "patronage appointee," it should come as little surprise that Buttigieg is out of his depth as transportation secretary.
This is the seedy game of political patronage—one played by Democrats and Republicans alike—and it's just one reason that the economist Ludwig von Mises called the bureaucratic system "essentially antiliberal, undemocratic, and un-American."
Still, it would be a mistake to think the solution is simply to install the right leader at the Transportation Department. Mayor Pete may be a poor administrator, like most patronage appointees, but bureaucracy itself is the bigger problem.
Mises noted the system is almost fanatically hostile to private property and free enterprise, and because it lacks the incentive structure of markets, it tends to be terribly inefficient. As a result, bureaucracy is a recipe for economic waste, sclerosis, and decay.
Bureaucracy "paralyzes the conduct of business and lowers the productivity of labor. By heedless spending it squanders the nation's wealth. It is inefficient and wasteful," Mises explained in his book Bureaucracy. "Although it styles what it does planning, it has no definite plans and aims."
On Wednesday, as hundreds of thousands of Americans were stranded in airports, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said the situation was not acceptable.
"The public needs a resilient air transportation system," Cantwell said.
She's right. The first step is getting politicians out of the air transportation business.
Jon Miltimore is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
