As you watch the debate about the air traffic control system failures remember that I said this on CBS in a nationwide talk on April 7, 1995: “The United States Government is the largest purchaser of vacuum tubes in the Western world. This is a Federal Aviation Administration vacuum tube. Good solid 1895 technology. This is the updated mid-1950s version. When you fly in America, vacuum tubes in the air traffic control system keep you safe. Our purchasing rules are so complicated and so wasteful that our government has notbeen able in seven years to figure out how to replace vacuum tubes with this. This is a microchip that has the computing power of 3 million vacuum tubes. So today's government operates this way; “ the primary problem is not money. The primary problem is a regulatory system so incredibly complex and virtually impossible to make work that money just gets absorbed while almost nothing gets accomplished. For the NextGen modernization initiative, GAO documented more than $14 billion spent during FY2007–FY2022. Despite these investments, GAO reported that 76% of FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems were unsustainable or potentially unsustainable in 2024. Congress should pass an emergency deregulation and rapid implementation act liberating all federal air traffic control system modernization to proceed at the most rapid rate and with the most modern management tools. I served 11 years on the House Aviation Subcommittee (becoming ranking just before I became Republican whip in 1989). We have needed to modernize the air traffic control system for the last four decades. It is an absurd example of the American lawyer and bureaucrat dominated system making implementation virtually impossible.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) November 14, 2026
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