Don’t Politicize Aviation Safety

Yesterday, the United States suffered the first fatal crash of a U.S. airliner in 16 years. American Airlines Flight 5342, a regional jetliner, originated in Wichita, Kansas. Just before landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in northern Virginia, it collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River. Scores of people were feared dead late yesterday. Authorities haven’t yet determined the cause of the collision. The National Transportation Safety Board will lead an investigation, hoping to determine what happened and prevent any similar accidents in the future.

There is no reason to believe that the dramatic changes to the federal government made by the Trump administration, or the chaos they introduced, played any role in this tragedy. But the success of regulators in improving the safety of commercial aviation is among the great triumphs of the past half century. And in its first week in office, the Trump administration did take one unrelated step that suggests a cavalier disregard for the consequences of politicizing those efforts: It dismissed all of the members of the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body that advised the Transportation Security Administration.

“The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports,” the Associated Press reported last week. “Before Tuesday, the group included representatives of all the key groups in the industry—including the airlines and major unions—as well as members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing. The vast majority of the group’s recommendations were adopted over the years.”

My colleague James Fallows, a longtime pilot who has reported on aviation for decades, noted yesterday that dismantling the committee one week ago “wasn’t part of tonight’s tragedy,” but argued that it is a thoughtless destruction of a taken-for-granted institution that will erode safety over time, when the United States should instead be conserving the gains of recent decades. Pointing his readers to a list of the board’s former members, Fallows wrote that it “was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned.”

I favor a smaller federal government, and will likely cheer some cuts that the Trump administration makes. My hope is for a bureaucracy that does fewer things and does them well.

But aviation safety in America is the envy of the world––it’s among the few things that was working well, having improved significantly in recent decades under a status quo that Donald Trump is disrupting. To what end? Perhaps the Trump administration has some compelling rationale that it hasn’t shared for disbanding the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. If so, it should speak up.

Instead, a Department of Homeland Security official offered a vague and unpersuasive statement to Aviation International News: “The Department of Homeland Security will no longer tolerate any advisory committee which pushes agendas that attempt to undermine its national security mission, the President’s agenda, or Constitutional rights of Americans,” he said.

Congress should demand better answers, for the sake of the due diligence that airline safety warrants, and because stripping a mandated board of all its members would seem to thwart its legitimate power with a technicality. If Congress judges that the board is still useful, it should use the power of the purse to force its restoration, rather than giving in to the president.

Will Republicans, who hold a majority in the House and the Senate, jealously guard the legislature’s powers and diligently discharge its oversight responsibilities? Perhaps not. Deferring to presidents from one’s own party is a bipartisan sin, however derelict it makes legislators in their duties. While Trump undoubtedly has a popular mandate for aspects of his agenda, however, no voter sent him to Washington to end an aviation-safety committee. He is owed no deference on that move.

Trump is making a lot of changes very quickly. If GOP legislators won’t probe this one to see if it is arbitrary or ill-considered, it’s hard to imagine what will spur them to exercise their oversight responsibilities––after all, most members of Congress are frequent flyers.