The Federal Aviation Administration's role as both operator of the U.S. air traffic control system and regulator of aviation safety creates an inherent conflict of interest that undermines safety oversight, according to a new backgrounder published by Reason Foundation on June 10, 2026. Written by transportation policy director Robert Poole, the report argues that the United States is increasingly isolated in maintaining this dual structure while most developed countries have separated these functions following international best practices.
The report details how the FAA stands alone among U.S. Department of Transportation agencies in both operating and regulating a mode of transportation. The Federal Railroad Administration regulates railways but doesn't manage train dispatching, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulates motor vehicle safety but doesn't set speed limits or control traffic lights. Meanwhile, nearly all other federal safety regulatory agencies—including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Food and Drug Administration—operate at arm's length from the industries they regulate. The International Civil Aviation Organization issued a recommended policy in 2001 calling for organizational separation between aviation safety regulation and service provision like air traffic control. Since then, some 100 countries now receive air traffic control services from reformed, self-funded air navigation service providers regulated separately from their transport ministries, including 70 countries with self-supporting systems and another 30 served by four multi-country organizations.
According to the report, "In its safety regulatory activities, the FAA appears to use a different standard for its ATC staff than for outside parties that it regulates." The backgrounder cites a 2009 Colgan Air crash near Buffalo that triggered a major FAA effort to revise pilot fatigue regulations, while a 2007 Comair crash in Lexington, Kentucky—where the National Transportation Safety Board found controller fatigue to be a factor—prompted no similar effort to revise controller scheduling rules. In another case, when a Northwest Airlines flight overshot Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2009, the FAA immediately suspended the pilots' licenses but took no action regarding controllers who took over an hour to notify NORAD instead of the required 10 minutes. The National Transportation Safety Board reported in 1993 that "FAA has allowed itself to shortchange safety in ways it would not tolerate in an air carrier or corporate flight operations."
The report explains that this conflict becomes especially critical as air traffic control systems make decisions involving trade-offs between safety and capacity. Aviation safety expert Clinton Oster of Indiana University, quoted in the backgrounder, notes that decisions about aircraft separation standards and runway configurations can pose trade-offs that the FAA currently makes internally. If operations and regulation were separated, "the debate about trade-offs between safety and capacity would be more public and open to outside scrutiny," according to Oster's analysis. The backgrounder points to a historical precedent: Congress separated the Atomic Energy Commission—which both promoted and regulated nuclear power—into the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1974 specifically because of its inherent conflict of interest. Previous U.S. reform efforts have embraced this separation principle, including a 1994 Clinton administration proposal for a nonprofit U.S. Air Traffic Services corporation and a 2016 proposal from then-Rep. Bill Shuster that gained support from air traffic controllers and major airlines before stalling due to opposition from business and general aviation groups.
The report recommends organizationally separating the Air Traffic Organization from the FAA, making it self-supporting through bondable user fees while leaving the FAA as the independent safety regulator. With the Department of Transportation planning to relocate FAA staff from the Mall to Navy Yard between 2026 and 2028, the backgrounder suggests relocating Air Traffic Organization staff to a site outside Washington, D.C.—possibly near the FAA command center in Warrenton, Virginia—to reinforce the arm's-length separation. This change would align the United States with International Civil Aviation Organization principles and put it in line with global practice among developed nations.