For FAA, Money Isn't Everything

EXECUTIVE MEMO

For FAA, Money Isn't Everything

arching orders, not money, were the most important thing the Federal Aviation Administration received in its 1996 spending bill. The agency took a slight funding cut-2 percent-but was told to create a new personnel system and redo the way it buys equipment and services. That was the good news. The bad news is the renovations were due April 1.

No one who flies or rides airplanes is unaware of FAA's recent equipment problems-at least 20 failures in the air traffic control system since last April. An equipment upgrade program begun in 1981 with a target cost of $10 billion spun out of control and remains unfinished, its price now estimated at $37 billion.

Less publicized staffing problems also plague the agency. It's hard to keep enough of FAA's 17,400 controllers at high-traffic, high-stress centers in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where living costs also are high. Technicians capable of repairing and maintaining aging equipment are in shorter and shorter supply and many already are eligible to retire. By 2002, the number of people flying is expected to rise 35 percent and the number of takeoffs and landings by 18 percent, but FAA projects its budget and hiring won't keep up.

The Clinton Administration and Congress have proposed a variety of fixes, ranging from retooling the agency and keeping it within the Transportation Department, to making it a government corporation or selling it to the private sector. For now, the new personnel and purchasing systems are all both sides could agree on.

Using its experience and the advice of a committee of private sector and government experts, FAA plans a "cradle-to-grave" renovation of the way it buys equipment, says Carl Schellenberg, executive director of the reform effort.

The acquisition makeover will start with reviewing the way FAA decides which problems to solve and will end with rethinking how it maintains, operates and takes out of service the equipment purchased to solve them, according to Schellenberg. "If you only focus on the buying, you've only handled part of the problem."

Staffing changes will take longer and have less visible effects, Schellenberg says, but could prevent real problems in the future. Reformers are considering gain-sharing, relocation bonuses, retention incentives and a wide range of staffing options to remake the rules under which employees work. Unions and managers sit on all six task forces working on the new system, evidence of the agency's strong commitment to labor-management partnership, Schellenberg says. Union members are skeptical about that commitment, especially because Congress told FAA to remake its system without regard to laws setting out union rights.

On top of that, the FAA's 1996 appropriation knocked out funds for the agency's Quality Through Partnership program for training managers and unionists in consensus decision-making and other cooperative techniques, and the National Air Traffic Controller's Association has pulled out of partnerships in Chicago and Atlanta.

The FAA says it will deliver some, but not all, of its recommendations for changing its personnel system to Congress by April 1. More will follow, Schellenberg says, because some "would be foolhardy to force-fit" so quickly.