The Transportation Department is upping its funding request for air traffic control (ATC) modernization by several billion dollars as the effort faces cost and schedule concerns.
Reuters reported Tuesday that DOT Secretary Sean Duffy said the agency is “going to ask Congress for $30 billion.” Congress in 2025 allocated $12.5 billion toward the project, known as the Brand New ATC System (BNATCS), and Duffy’s appeal would put the total cost at $42.5 billion.
The DOT in 2025 said the full effort, which involves upgrading ATC facilities, infrastructure, and software, would cost about $31.5 billion.
Duffy and other officials have described Congress’ $12.5 billion allocation as a “down payment.” In August, the secretary said the DOT “would love” another $20 billion for BNATCS by year’s end but would settle for $10 billion. He added that in that case a “second $10 billion” would be needed to fund the “actual bricks and mortar” for new ATC towers and facilities.
Per Reuters, about $10 billion of Duffy’s new $30 billion request would fund replacement of aging ATC towers. Another $10 billion would cover telecommunications and other technology systems, and a third $10 billion would go toward airport facility improvements.
The funding would also support the FAA’s expansion of Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART—an AI-based platform that rolled out initially in the Washington, D.C. area this week. The DOT said SMART will synthesize information from hundreds of data streams and use it to make recommendations to controllers, which they could accept or decline.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford in August said that BNATCS would “not be successful” unless SMART is rolled out in tandem with the project’s other upgrades.
Duffy’s increased ask follows a telecommunications failure at the FAA’s Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility Monday, which disrupted flights throughout the Northeast. The same facility was involved in another series of communications failures affecting New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport (KEWR) in 2025.
Bedford this month said that old copper wiring supporting the ATC telecommunication system would be completely upgraded to fiber, satellite, and wireless connections by September 2027. He said 64 percent of that work is already complete but that other portions of BNATCS face delays.
Upping the Ante
Duffy’s $30 billion request is more than what officials previously requested or said they would be seeking, and it would push BNATCS’ budget higher than the FAA’s previous NextGen modernization effort.
Bedford earlier in September asked Congress for “at least $10 billion” more and said its failure to fund the rest of the effort could “see the [National Airspace] System slip into higher delays, higher cancelations, and a less resilient airspace.”
Bedford said that Phase 1 of BNATCS is “costing $16 billion,” which is what it had requested from Congress in 2025, but the FAA “just didn’t get the funding that we requested” and is now “funding that gap.” He added that “some of the slipping that we’re seeing…looks like it may put pressure on delivering” Phase 1 by 2028.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that NextGen delivered only 16 percent of its promised benefits after 20 years and $36 billion spent. The first phase of BNATCS, which began in 2025, has a much shorter time horizon of about three years.
A more recent GAO report raised concerns that BNATCS could go the way of NextGen without accurate cost estimates and organized planning, which it said the FAA lacked. Bedford pushed back on that assessment and said the agency has “lifecycle cost estimates for the entirety of the project” and a “highly integrated master work schedule.”
Bedford said Congress’ $12.5 billion is “allowing us to build a solid foundation” but that significantly more is needed. The House Appropriations Committee in June approved a $4 billion allocation to the FAA’s facilities and equipment (F&E) account for fiscal year 2027, but Bedford said only $1.5 billion of that is earmarked for ATC modernization.
He said the rest would be used to sustain legacy ATC systems.
“We’re spending the majority of our budget keeping the lights turned on,” Bedford said.
