Testimony of Bryan Bedford, FAA Administrator, Hearing Before The Committee On Appropriations, Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies: The Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request for the Federal Aviation Administration
Chairman Womack, Ranking Member Clyburn, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Administration’s $22.4 billion Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Budget request for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA’s mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world. To execute this mission and meet aviation’s current challenges and future opportunities, the agency is committed to investing in hiring and training the best people, who make the FAA the global standard of aviation; providing them with the best equipment and automation systems through our rapid modernization of the National Airspace System (NAS); and strengthening our foundation of safety.
People
The FAA cannot meet the President’s goal of building a brand new air traffic control system by the end of 2028 using an outdated organizational structure, which is why earlier this year, the FAA announced an agency-wide organizational realignment that will position the FAA for future success. It strengthens our safety foundation, enhances operational excellence, and improves accountability and transparency. A central element of the new organizational structure is the establishment of the Office of Aviation Safety Management. This new office will centralize safety management activities previously conducted in separate FAA organizations.
The organizational realignment maintains the FAA’s longstanding recognition that people are the agency’s greatest strength. Air traffic controllers, technicians, and aviation inspectors are critical to our success in delivering on the FAA’s mission, ensuring that tens of thousands of aircraft are guided safely to their destinations every day, that the aircraft being flown are safe for operation, and that the crews that operate them are well qualified for the mission. To ensure the agency can safely meet current and future traffic demands, the FAA launched a multi-year hiring and training surge for air traffic controllers. Our 2026 Controller Workforce Plan addresses the longstanding staffing shortage, prepares the workforce for future demand, and ensures the long-term safety and operational efficiency of the NAS. Incorporating findings from the National Academies of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board, which reviewed existing staffing models and methodologies, this new staffing model adjusted the FAA’s staffing target to 12,563 Certified Professional Controllers (CPCs) based on anticipated demand. As of August 2026, approximately 11,000 CPCs were deployed, across our 313 Federal Air Traffic Control facilities, with an additional 4,000 controllers in the training pipeline, including approximately 900 previously certified controllers who are in the process of completing facility-specific training after relocation.
Deploying a modern staffing model and automated scheduling tools will improve staffing efficiency and reduce the need for overtime. Increased staffing, lower overtime requirements, and providing our controllers with better schedules will significantly increase our controllers’ quality of life.
The agency met its controller 2,000 trainee hiring goal in FY 2025 and we will exceed our target of 2,200 additional trainees in FY 2026. Furthermore, the FY 2027 budget request includes $95.4 million to go beyond that target and hire and train 2,300 new air traffic controller trainees in FY 2027. I appreciate the ongoing congressional support to continue to invest in growing our controller workforce.
NAS Modernization
Demands on the NAS are evolving—commercial flights are conservatively forecasted to increase more than 40 percent by 2046, the number of drone operations and commercial space launches will continue to increase, and quite soon electric aircraft are joining our skies. But the NAS is built on obsolete, outdated technology and that causes avoidable delays and cancellations. To ensure we have a NAS that is built to handle the traffic, diversity, and complexity of modern skies, we launched a large-scale, comprehensive modernization initiative to deliver a safer and more resilient NAS.
Thanks to President Trump’s and Secretary Duffy’s leadership and this Congress’ bipartisan commitment to this endeavor and the historic $12.5 billion investment received through the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, the agency has made significant progress in record time. Over the last year, the FAA has met or exceeded its accelerated transformation schedule. As of September 1, 2026, we have replaced over 64 percent of our copper-based Time-Division Multiplexing Infrastructure telecommunications network with modern equipment, transitioned 21 towers from paper flight strips to electronic displays, installed 101 surface awareness initiative systems at airports, converted over 403 radio sites, and installed 6 surface movement radars at 5 airports.
The FY 2027 President’s budget request allows the agency to maintain its rapid pace of modernization, supplementing the initial $12.5 billion downpayment with an additional $1.5 billion, from our annual F&E budget, for these vital safety improvements to the air traffic control infrastructure. These funds will also allow us to address important programs like our telecommunications modernization, as well as start funding critical modernization work in our automation systems to revolutionize how we safely manage air traffic growth demands.
The Brand New Air Traffic Control System is one of the most ambitious and critical infrastructure projects of our time. But updating our obsolete and unsustainable infrastructure is only part of the modernization initiative. To ensure a resilient, efficient, scalable, and future-ready NAS, we must modernize the traffic flow management systems, strategic planning tools, safety automation systems, and the network that ties it all together. We will accomplish this with four major foundational upgrades that revolutionize how we provide air traffic services in the near future.
- The FAA Enterprise Network Services (FENS) will become the foundation for exchanging critical air traffic information across the NAS and enable cyber-secure cloud computing services with unlimited computing power across the NAS. It replaces an aging and extremely limited 1980’s network architecture that presently connects airports, weather systems, radar, voice communications, and aircraft. FENS means stronger cybersecurity, enhanced resiliency, fewer delays, and cloud computing that provides timely access to reliable operational data, along with a massive increase in our data processing power capabilities and bandwidth. By transitioning to cloud capabilities and FENS, we will improve system availability, scalability, and performance while supporting continuous operations.
- The Flow Management Data and Services (FMDS) collects real time data including weather, airline schedules, and live aircraft positions and future flight trajectories to estimate current and future traffic flows and capacity optimization across the NAS. Right now, controllers manage multiple screens of data to keep the public safe. FMDS brings all that data into one real-time domain picture.
- The Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART) is a cloud-based system that takes FMDS information and uses AI to predict congestion and conflicts earlier, adjusting departure times, routes, and timing at designated points enroute. SMART reduces delays, predicts schedules, and safely creates more efficient flight paths.
- Common Automation Platform (CAP) will provide a single, interoperable, safety automation system for all air traffic control functions—from high-altitude flights down to the runway. CAP is being designed with controller workload balance in mind, by providing one consistent interface, one training pipeline, one modern system to work with, and the modern safety technology our controllers deserve at their fingertips.
We will deploy commercially available technologies customized for the complex requirements of the largest and most challenging aviation ecosystem in the world. These upgrades build upon one another to reduce delays, minimize cancellations, and most importantly get the flying public to their final destinations safely and efficiently.
Safety
The new Office of Aviation Safety Management will integrate safety data sources from across the agency and provide near-real-time visibility into the collective risk in the NAS. Through the new Office of Aviation Safety Management, the FAA is coordinating a holistic risk management strategy at the agency level, eliminating data silos and ensuring real-time access to all agency-wide safety data and risk analysis. This strengthens the agency’s ability to proactively identify emerging safety trends and implement data-driven solutions.
The FAA is moving away from a strictly reactive posture—where we focus on investigating what went wrong after an incident—toward a more predictive posture, where we use AI-enabled analytics to evaluate emerging hazards and identify potential safety issues. By integrating data from all of the lines of business into one location, we unlock new insights into what might go wrong before it happens, and accordingly we can deploy potential mitigations.
Following the January 2025 crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, we partnered with industry to begin integrating our siloed systems. Using advanced analytics, we were able to evaluate hot spots at airports nationwide where helicopters routinely cross paths with major commercial arrival and departure routes in high-density airspace. Our hot spot review of integrated data showed us patterns and concentrations of risk that no single data source would have revealed on its own. As a result, we identified a systemic, historical reliance on visual separation in complex environments where human perception and line of sight vision simply isn’t enough to mitigate airborne conflict risk. We didn't wait. In March of this year, we issued a General Notice (GENOT) to air traffic controllers completely suspending the procedural use of visual separation between helicopters and airplanes in Class B, Class C, and Terminal Radar space. Controllers are now required to maintain strict, radar-based positive separation standards. This data was compelling, and the results following the implementation of the GENOT have been a fantastic safety success.
In another example, at San Francisco International Airport, FAA’s quality assurance processes proactively identified a routine lack of compliance pertaining to the use of parallel visual approach operations. The data was compelling. Accordingly, the agency assessed the associated risk and developed and implemented a targeted mitigation plan to restore compliance, including the development and implementation of new staggered aircraft approach paths to mitigate the risk of an aircraft overshooting the final approach course. We are continuing to monitor compliance and the effectiveness of this mitigation through continuous data analysis, enabling us to identify and address emerging trends before they result in a safety event.
What used to take our FAA safety analysts months—poring over data to find relationships in an often vain attempt to connect events—now can be done in near real time with significantly greater accuracy. The Administration’s FY 2027 Budget request will continue to bolster our ability to use comprehensive data integration strategies to keep the skies safe.
Finally, over the past year, the agency has moved forward on several major, high priority rulemakings that languished for years. Those rulemakings include proposals that would repeal the ban on overland supersonic flight and establish a noise-based certification standard for supersonic aircraft, and establish a process for operators and proprietors of certain fixed site facilities to request and maintain an unmanned aircraft flight restriction. Additionally, later this fall, we expect to issue a final rule that would expedite the integration of beyond visual line of sight drone operations in the NAS.
Also, we made great strides to achieve greater efficiency while maintaining safety through regulatory updates and process improvements. For example, in aircraft certification, we’re using the Modernization of the Special Airworthiness Certificate rule to provide flexibility where it makes sense and to focus our resources on areas of high risk as we work to enable the safe introduction of new and innovative products to the NAS. We’ve also made tremendous efforts to improve the processing of airman medical certificates, reducing the backlog of deferred unissued cases from 13,000 cases in January 2025 to 3,600, and those cases waiting for flight surgeon review from 8,000 to 346.
Conclusion
I want to thank the 44,000 dedicated men and women of the FAA who work tirelessly, every day, to keep our Nation’s skies running safely despite the limitations placed on them by the age of their tools and facilities. I want to thank the Administration and this Congress for your trust in the FAA to make the historic $12.5 billion initial investment that has allowed us to make extraordinary progress in the first year of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System program.
That initial investment is building a solid foundation for the new NAS. The next investment, however, will allow the FAA to build upon that foundation and develop new technology and systems to fully complete the creation of a modern NAS. Let me be clear, if we do not make this incremental, follow-on investment and fully complete this historic project, this will be a failure for the future of aviation. The result of that failure will be more delays, more cancellations, more frustrations for our citizens traveling by air, and sadly a system that is less capable, less innovative, and less safe than what we and our families deserve. The opportunity in front of us is clear: let’s work together to build on the momentum already underway and deliver the modern NAS the American public rightfully expects and deserves.
We appreciate the House’s strong support for the agency’s modernization efforts. By fully funding our requirements and providing key reprogramming flexibilities in the FY 2027 appropriations bill, Congress is making a vital investment in our Nation’s aviation infrastructure. We look forward to ongoing engagement with Congress as we build a safer, more efficient, and more resilient NAS.
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