Ironic: A member of Congress lecturing the FAA Administrator on financial stewardship. From Tuesday’s (July 5) edition of The [Tacoma, WA] News Tribune: “We need to see a realistic strategy for funding NextGen,” she [Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.] told FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt at a May hearing. “To date, the FAA has filled its budget request with a laundry list of programs and development activities, and a vague promise that somehow the agency will achieve its goals by 2018. But that approach is not enough this year.”
Whether you support NextGen, or not, is not the point. At least not in this case. The FAA has been funded, since September 30, 2007, by temporary authorization. The FAA currently is working with funding extension TWENTY which passed last week and will expire July 22. Twenty-One? Anyone for extention number twenty-one? Yeah, it’s coming.
So hearing Patty Murray admonish Administrator Babbitt in this manner is a little like hearing a home-builder who has yet to pour the foundation complain about curtain colors.
