The Federal Aviation Administration needs some tech support.
Before any flight takes off, pilots are supposed to read a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) that outlines any potential safety problems they might encounter during their flight. Full of numerical codes and special acronyms, these critical digital messages include warnings about disruptions like bad weather conditions, traveling flocks of birds, and even nearby rocket launches. But as an outage that grounded thousands of flights across the US last week made clear, the NOTAM system is also fragile.
The root of the problem appears to be a computer operating system that the Federal Aviation Administration has used to relay NOTAMs for the past three decades. The FAA is still reviewing what went wrong, but it believes that “personnel” — reportedly two contractors who didn’t follow procedures — uploaded a damaged file to the computer system that sends NOTAMs to pilots. The agency initially tried to fix the issue without causing a major impact to flight schedules, but ended up ordering a hold on all flight takeoffs in the US that lasted over an hour — a scale of disruption not seen since the agency grounded all flights during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This looks really bad for the FAA, which has struggled to keep up financially and technically as the number of people flying continues to surge. Scrutiny of the agency and the airlines it regulates has only grown over the past several years, especially amid an ongoing pilot shortage, surging fuel prices, rising tensions over working conditions, and increasingly problematic IT systems. Now, whether the FAA can provide the aviation industry with the right course correction depends on overcoming the growing politicization of, well, planes.
Unfortunately, the fate of the FAA lies with an increasingly chaotic Congress, which controls the agency’s funding. Earlier this month, one Republican House member proposed setting up an Office of Advanced Aviation to develop systems that are better suited to future aviation tech, and the Senate Commerce Committee now has plans to investigate how the NOTAM issue happened. The recent tumult has also drawn attention to the fact that the FAA doesn’t have a permanent administrator. President Joe Biden nominated Phillip Washington, the current CEO of the Denver International Airport, back in July, but the Senate still hasn’t scheduled a confirmation hearing. Meanwhile, the FAA’s current authorization bill, which provides the funding that the agency uses to do its work, will expire at the end of September unless Congress acts. The FAA’s current budget is less than it was in 2004, after accounting for inflation.
”This is hopefully a wake-up call to Congress to really give the funding that many of us have been calling for in the FAA to help modernize their system,” Georgia Tech engineering professor and aviation expert Laurie Garrow told Recode. “As our transportation system has grown — as we’ve gotten new threats, frankly, against our technologies — this is needed when we’re pushing the boundaries of what the system can do.”
The FAA’s technical problems aren’t a surprise. Last year, the agency asked for nearly $30 million to fix the tech that supports the NOTAM system. There had already been complaints from within the aviation industry that NOTAMs have become obsolete, and that the messages are too long and overloaded with useless information. The manual backup system doesn’t seem all that great, either. After the NOTAM computer system went down last Wednesday, air traffic controllers reportedly had to share whatever information may have been relayed in the digital NOTAMs verbally. Functionally, this meant reverting to radio transmissions and phone calls — the technology that the FAA used before the agency got computers.
There’s other evidence that the agency needs a serious tech overhaul. Hundreds of flights across the East Coast were canceled in August 2015 because of a technical glitch at an air traffic control center in Virginia. And last year, the rollout of 5G threatened to disrupt the entire airline industry after the FAA raised concerns that the new wireless service could interfere with the radio altimeters used by planes during landing. There is an effort to update the air traffic control system and the National Airspace System (NAS), but the transition has encountered hurdles and is still ongoing.
The technical issues go beyond just one federal agency. Hours after the NOTAM outage in the US, Canada’s air traffic management service encountered the same problem. And last month, a failure exacerbated by aging software that Southwest Airlines relies on to schedule workers led to the cancellation of thousands of flights, leaving passengers without flight crews and flight crews without passengers. It wasn’t the first time the airline has dealt with tech issues.
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Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
As Congress mulls its next move with the FAA, debate over where to lay the blame is heating up on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are busy criticizing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a potential 2025 presidential candidate. But the Revolving Door Project, a research group that investigates corporate influence on the executive branch, has suggested that issues at the FAA may stem from the Trump administration — although it also noted that Buttigieg was responsible for “the personnel decisions about who was overseeing the situation.” In response to the fiasco, Buttigieg has said that there should be “enough safeguards built into the system” that a single person’s error or mistake can’t have such an enormous impact on US aviation.
“It’s been partisan at least since the 1950s,” Janet Bednarek, a history professor at the University of Dayton, told Recode. “Arguments over what is the responsibility of the government? What is the responsibility of the airlines who use this system or the private pilots who use the system? The politics have been there since early on, and then you throw those into a highly partisan political environment like we have today.”
It’s not clear where the battle over the FAA’s future will go next. While Democrats have used the fiasco to double down on their support for Biden’s nominee, Phillip Washington, Republicans are still raising objections. Their latest criticism is an emerging argument that Washington, a retired Army command sergeant major, doesn’t technically qualify as a civilian. The law apparently requires that the FAA administrator be a civilian or receive a “military waiver” from Congress.
Of course, there’s also a reasonable explanation why NOTAM updates haven’t happened organically. The technology has been tested by time, and pilots know their way around this system on its best days and on its worst. They can’t say the same of something they haven’t used yet.
“You know what can go wrong with the system that you have,” explained Bednarek. “You don’t know what can go wrong with the new system.”
This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
Want to save the bees? First, throw out most of what you know about them.
What do you know about bees? That they produce honey? That they live in a hive? That they swarm?
Well, I have news: These characteristics don’t actually describe most bees in the US. Of the roughly 4,000 native species, not a single one produces true honey. Not one! Most of them live alone. Most of them have no queen.
The bees that many people are familiar with are honey bees, Apis mellifera, a nonnative species that Americans brought over from Europe centuries ago. Beekeepers manage them like any other farm animal, to produce honey and pollinate crops.
European honey bees are arguably the world’s most famous insect. They’re honey bees! Fuzzy, buzzing, honey-making honey bees! And they deserve at least some of this attention. About one-third of the food we eat comes from plants that honey bees pollinate, and they face several threats, which has fueled a national campaign to “save the bees.”
But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.
Honey bees are ultimately not at risk of disappearing. So perhaps, then, all this time we’ve been saving the wrong bees.
“People are devoting a lot of their love and attention and funding to honey bees,” said Hollis Woodard, a bee researcher at the University of California Riverside. “That can be detrimental to wild bees. If we really want to say, ‘Save the bees,’ I think we need to get some facts straight about who’s who and what’s what.”
The rise of the honey bee
The bee that many Americans adore was carried here on wooden ships 400 years ago. At the time, US farms were small and pollinated by wild insects. Settlers used the new bees (newbies?) for candle wax and, of course, honey.
But in the following centuries, as farms spread and native pollinators declined, honey bees became big business as commercial pollinators. Conveniently, the bees pollinate a wide range of crops and they live in colonies that can be trucked across the country, arriving at farms when plants are in bloom.
Today, the US has nearly 3 million colonies of honey bees, amounting to tens of billions of bees. They pollinate roughly $15 billion worth of crops each year, from California almonds to zucchini.
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Honey bees became popular because they help produce our food. What turned them into environmental icons, however, was a somewhat misleading narrative around “the decline of bees” that emerged in the aughts.
Around 2006, beekeepers started reporting huge losses of honey bee colonies. “That rang alarm bells,” said James Cane, a bee expert and researcher emeritus at USDA. “The business of bee keeping was under threat,” he said, and calls to “save the bees” circulated.
This threat was, and still is, very real. On top of pesticides and the loss of habitats, parasitic mites were spreading rapidly among hives in the 2000s and causing colonies to collapse, which is still a concern today.
But the decline of bees, as most of the public understands it, was always about managed, nonnative honey bees, not wild bees. This distinction is important because European honey bees have a whole industry working to sustain them — to treat sick colonies — whereas wild bees don’t.
Even at the height of the bee declines, there were still more than 2 million colonies in the US. Globally, meanwhile, honey bee colonies are now up more than 80 percent since the 1960s.
“There are likely more honey bees on the planet now than there ever have been in history,” said Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a nonprofit that advocates for pollinator conservation. “There’s not a conservation concern.”
The same can’t be said for native bees.
Many native bees are at risk of extinction
If native bees aren’t like honey bees, what are they like? Most of them are solitary and nest in the ground. Most don’t have queens. They don’t do dances to find honey. And none of them produce the kind of honey we eat (bumblebees do make a honey-like substance from nectar, though in much smaller quantities).
They’re also a diverse bunch. Some are just a couple of millimeters long and look like gnats, while others — bumblebees and carpenter bees, for example — are longer than an inch. Many bees consume nectar and pollen, like honey bees; others eat oil!
The images below show just a handful of them, from the small, metallic sweat bee (which will, indeed, drink human sweat) to the furry, and even cute, American bumblebee.
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As a group, wild bees are considered incredibly important pollinators, especially for home gardens and crops that honey bees can’t pollinate. Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, for example, require “buzz pollination;” bees have to vibrate their bodies to shake the pollen free — a behavior that honey bees can’t do (bumblebees and some other native species can).
Yet these free services native bees provide are dwindling. While wild bees are, as a group, understudied, existing research suggests that many species are threatened with extinction. “From a conservationist’s point of view, native bees are the ones in more dire need of support,” Alison McAfee, a bee researcher at the University of British Columbia, has written.
Nearly one in four native bees in North America is imperiled, according to a 2017 assessment by the Center of Biological Diversity, a research and advocacy group. These include species that are already federally endangered — like the rusty patched bumblebee — and a pipeline of others that are “marching towards the Endangered Species List,” Woodard said.
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Joel Page/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
The main threat is the same one facing nearly all wildlife: the destruction of natural habitats, such as grasslands. “Native bees have been in retreat to the extent that wildland habitat has been in retreat,” Cane said.
He used Iowa as an example: Over the last two centuries, the state has lost more than 99 percent of its tall-grass prairie, mostly to industrial agriculture. So has Illinois. Prairies are full of wildflowers and an incredibly important landscape for bees, including the rusty patched bumblebee.
Pesticides and fungicides are a problem, too, especially a group of chemicals called neonicotinoids designed to kill agricultural pests. “We have just shown time and time again that neonics are bad,” Woodard said. “They get taken up in the pollen in nectar; they hurt bees in many different ways.”
As Vox has previously reported, US pesticide regulation is often behind the science on how these agrochemicals harm bees and other pollinators. (Neonicotinoids are mostly banned in Europe but remain legal in nearly all of the US.)
More and more, research also points to yet another, somewhat paradoxical threat.
How honey bees might hurt wild bees
Honey bees are highly skilled foragers. A single colony can collect about 22 pounds of pollen pellets (pollen mixed with some nectar) over three summer months, according to a 2016 study led by Cane.
That’s enough to feed the offspring of 110,000 solitary bees, the study found. “Honey bees are exceptionally good at removing pollen from landscapes,” Woodard said.
And that can be a problem for native bees. In certain landscapes, where flowering plants are limited, native insects compete with honey bees for pollen and nectar. As a result, they may have to travel farther to forage and ultimately gather less food for their young.
Plus, some native bees only collect pollen from one or a handful of flowers; unlike honey bees, these species can’t easily switch from one source of food to another as pollen runs low.
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“You can’t have a finite resource, add a domesticated animal that consumes it, and expect that everything is hunky dory afterwards,” Cane said. (A growing body of research shows that competition with honey bees is bad for native bees.)
Commercial beekeepers often let their bees forage in natural ecosystems when the insects are not working on a farm, Cane said. In Utah, where he’s based, managed honey bee apiaries are sometimes parked on public lands, and each one might have 30 or even 60 colonies. It’s like a city of people hungry for food, ready to pillage the countryside, he said. There are also colonies of “feral” honey bees — those that aren’t managed by humans — across the country.
Competition isn’t the only concern. Dense colonies of honey bees can also be reservoirs for viruses and other microbes that can cause wildlife diseases, McAfee told Vox. Experts like her fear that those viruses could spill over to the native bee populations, though there are still plenty of unknowns. “We don’t know to what extent those viruses cause true disease and sickness in the native bees,” McAfee said.
What’s clear, she said, is that scientists need to better understand and eradicate disease in managed honey bee colonies to stop potential deadly spillover. To protect wild bees, however, scientists will need solutions that go beyond the honey bee.
How you can help save the bees
Barring wholesale changes to our food system, we’ll still need honey bees. But we need wild bees, too.
Farms rely on them, including those with commercial crops (native bees enhance crop yields even on farms that deploy honey bees) and home gardens. If there are flowers growing in your yard — sunflowers, maybe, or echinacea — bees likely pollinate them.
That brings us to what is perhaps the easiest way that individuals can help native bees: Plant flowers! Especially native ones that bloom at different times of year. Groups like Xerces Society make this easy by providing planting guides for each region.
Native bees (and lots of other critters) also benefit from a bit of mess, Woodard said. Don’t rake up every leaf. Leave a fallen branch in place.
“We need a sea change in how we think about the spaces around us, and what is a ‘pretty space,’ and what does it mean to be a good steward,” Woodard said. “Keep things wild, leave things a little less manicured.”
What you definitely shouldn’t do, experts say, is buy a honey bee colony. “That’s definitely not helping,” McAfee said. Instead, she said, “people should think about making native bees want to come to them.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that officials might have to deploy “extraordinary measures” soon to make sure the country can keep paying its bills.
The United States is expected to hit the debt ceiling — the total amount of money the federal government can legally borrow — as soon as Thursday. If lawmakers are still clashing over negotiations to raise the debt limit when it does, the Treasury Department will have to start deploying what it calls “extraordinary measures” to make sure the country can keep paying its bills.
Although “extraordinary measures” might sound alarming, economists say the Treasury has a history of using them, and those changes shouldn’t immediately impact the lives of Americans. They essentially work as accounting tools that temporarily allow the government to continue funding its normal operations and help buy Congress more time to reach a deal.
In a letter last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said officials expected the current debt limit of $31.4 trillion to be breached on Thursday. She also said the department could not provide an estimate for how long officials could use extraordinary measures, but it was unlikely that both the Treasury’s cash and measures would be exhausted before early June.
If the country does eventually default on its debts for the first time, the consequences would be dire. That would not only be bad for Americans who depend on government benefits like Social Security checks, but it would also create chaos in the stock market and inflict pain across the broader economy.
Americans shouldn’t be immediately impacted by “extraordinary measures”
Extraordinary measures are basically accounting maneuvers. For example, the Treasury Department would pause investments in some government funds, then make them up once the debt limit is raised or suspended.
By suspending investments in certain funds, the Treasury temporarily reduces the amount of debt these funds hold, which would allow the government to stay under the borrowing cap and continue standard operations for a longer period, said Rachel Snyderman, a senior associate director of business and economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Yellen said the department plans to deploy two measures this month to delay a default: redeeming existing and suspending new investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which provides benefits to government workers, and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. They are also expected to suspend reinvestment of the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.
Other potential options include suspending the daily reinvestment of securities held by the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is used to buy or sell foreign currencies, or suspending the issuance of State and Local Government Series securities.
Synderman said the measures were a “temporary fix” that Americans should not immediately notice. For example, she said, the Treasury would not be “dipping into the hard-earned savings of federal employees” by carrying out the measures, and the Treasury would eventually restore the funds and any interest that would have otherwise been earned.
According to the Treasury, civil service benefit payments, postal retiree health benefit payments, and payments from the retirement fund for federal employees would continue to be made as long as the country had not exhausted its extraordinary measures. Once a deal on the debt limit was reached, the funds would be “made whole” and recipients would be unaffected.
Treasury secretaries have a history of deploying these measures in recent years, regardless of which political party holds control of the White House or either chamber of Congress, Snyderman said. The Treasury last deployed these measures in August 2021 before lawmakers eventually raised the debt limit. They were also used in March 2019, December 2017, and March 2017, according to a timeline compiled by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The measures were first used in September 1985 and formally authorized in October 1986.
But Snyderman said the Treasury cannot rely on these actions indefinitely since funds can be completely disinvested. When a fund is down to zero, the measure can no longer be used to extend borrowing capacity.
“Once extraordinary measures kick in, the average American is not going to see a change overnight,” Snyderman said. “Extraordinary measures signal that the clock is ticking and as time progresses, we are going to see changes in the economy.”
The government is limited in what it can do after
If the extraordinary measures are exhausted and the Treasury runs out of cash, economists say there isn’t much the federal government can do to pay all of its obligations on time until lawmakers reach a deal.
Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the United States was facing the “highest probability of some sort of a default in decades.”
If the country reached a point where it could not pay all of its bills, Strain said the Treasury could attempt to prioritize some obligations. For instance, Treasury officials could choose to first pay all bondholders who hold federal debt, then military salaries and Social Security benefits, but then decide they don’t have enough money to cover bills incurred by the National Park Service, Strain said. The Treasury has not had to prioritize certain payments over others before, however, and it is unclear if that would be successful or met with legal challenges.
“There are real questions about whether or not that would work,” Strain said.
Some have also raised the prospect of the treasury secretary minting a trillion-dollar coin, depositing it into the Treasury’s account at the Fed, and then using those funds to keep the government operating until the debt limit is raised, although economists say that’s unlikely. Congress has made clear that its will is to control the debt ceiling, and the Treasury likely wouldn’t try to clearly subvert that, said Wendy Edelberg, the director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
The Federal Reserve could also attempt to stabilize financial markets and boost the economy by purchasing Treasury bonds if the country does default on its debts, Edelberg said. But the central bank could also be wary about worsening inflation, which is still uncomfortably high, she said. The Fed has been aggressively raising interest rates for months to bring rapid price increases under control.
“In a different environment, you might think that the Fed could flood the market with money in order to somehow offset the negative effects of this,” Edelberg said. “But it would have to be careful not to do it in a way that fuels inflation.”
Although a default could have disastrous impacts on the economy, Edelberg said she was not very confident that lawmakers would reach a resolution on the debt limit soon.
“It’s irresponsible,” Edelberg said. “It would be a completely self-inflicted wound.”