Phil Washington, the chief executive of Denver International Airport, has withdrawn his nomination to be the next administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The FAA had recently come under fire for a string of near misses between planes and a software glitch that shut down commercial air traffic for the first time since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The agency had been without a Senate-approved administrator for almost a year.
Washington may have been barely qualified to lead the FAA, but the agency is going through big changes and both administrative and technological challenges. The FAA does not need “barely qualified.”
In fact, Washington had just two years of experience running the Denver airport.
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“It was pretty apparent that he didn’t have any experience with aviation safety. And the idea of on the job training of the FAA administrator I think is kind of a big risk,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska), a member of the Senate Commerce panel, said.
That’s a big “yes.”
The Senate panel had scheduled Mr. Washington’s nomination for a vote last week, but it was canceled over uncertainty about whether he could win approval.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was among those on the committee who had concerns about Mr. Washington’s FAA nomination. Democrats couldn’t afford to lose any votes without gaining the support of at least one Republican on the 14-13 member committee.
Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out some obvious holes in Mr. Washington’s resume during his confirmation hearing earlier this month.
“As I look at your record, I see a record where you’ve got experience with buses. You’ve got experience with trains,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said, referencing Washington’s jobs in Denver and Los Angeles.
But Washington’s biggest drawback was his insistence that he didn’t need a waiver from the Defense Department to take a civilian job in the private sector.
Rep. Sam Graves is the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and a professional pilot. He penned an op-ed in The Hill explaining why Mr. Washington needed a waiver in order to serve as FAA administrator.
Since President Eisenhower first signed the law establishing the FAA, it has been legally required that the administrator be a “civilian.” To avoid confusion, Congress made a point to elaborate further that the administrator must “be a civilian in the strictest sense of the word. Thus at the time he is nominated he may not be on the active or retired list of any regular component of the armed services…” (emphasis added). Congress added this requirement to firmly establish civilian control over our National Airspace System, which until 1958 had largely been managed by the military. This intent was so clear that President Eisenhower insisted that the first FAA administrator he nominated, retired Lt. General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, resign his commission in the Air Force and pull his name from the retired list in order to become the agency’s first leader.
The letter of the law is clear — the Congress that passed the Federal Aviation Act, the president who enacted it into law, and the first FAA administrator all clearly recognized that a retired member of the armed forces with an active status on a retired list does not meet the law’s definition of the term “civilian.”
It’s a moot point now — as is Washington’s failure to adequately answer some basic aviation safety questions at his hearing. What’s clear is that Biden cares more about box-checking (Washington is black) than the safety of the flying public.
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