Blog: FAA User-Fee System

Statement

Blog: FAA User-Fee System

By: Representative Dan Burton

As you may know for over four decades, excise taxes on general aviation fuel, airline passenger tickets, and cargo have financed the bulk of the expenses for airport improvements, modernizing the air traffic control system, researching new technologies, and the operations of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control system. These taxes deposited into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund currently supports nearly 87 percent of the FAA budget. The remainder of the FAA's budget is funded through annual appropriations from the General Tax Fund.

Increasingly over the last few years, revenues into the Trust Fund have fallen far short of the FAA's expenses; meaning a larger share of FAA's budget must be made up from general tax revenue. With tight federal budgets it is becoming increasingly harder to find the money to keep the world's safest, most efficient national airspace system operating to the high standards American have come to expect and deserve. The FAA's proposed solution is a user-fee system. In other words, make all the users of the system bear the burden of paying for the system.

I do believe that we need to find a way to reduce the amount of general tax revenue going to pay for FAA operations, but I am not sure a user-fee system is the best solution to the problem. First, Congress tried a user-fee approach with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the result has been, in my opinion, a far too cozy relationship between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry it purports to oversee. Second, I'm concerned that a user-fee system will affect impact some areas of the aviation industry more than others. For example, large commercial airlines would have few problems paying their user-fees but small general aviation companies could be driven out of business. Finally, I'm concerned that removing FAA's budget entirely from the appropriations process also means removing FAA from a large degree of Congressional oversight; and I do not believe that is what the American people want.

In the end, after studying all the options we may discover that a user-fee system is the most efficient and equitable method of funding FAA operations, but I think the jury is still out on that question. We need to do a lot more study; in the meantime, though, you can rest assured that I will continue to push FAA to reduce unnecessary costs.

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