Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Get the FAA out of the research and development business

Not started

632 19. Department of Transportation

“It should get out of the R&D business and focus on testing, evaluating, and certifying private-sector innovation much more quickly than it does today.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Congress moved the other way: the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 appropriates $290,000,000 from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund for FAA Research, Engineering and Development for fiscal 2026, available until 2028, including $40,000,000 for aviation workforce development. No Federal Register document or executive action closes the program, and the FAA continues to run its own R&D rather than confining itself to test, evaluation and certification. Corrected 2026-09-03 on one point: this note previously said neither the FY2026 discretionary request nor the FY2027 Budget proposes to end **or shrink** the research program. The second half is wrong. Both DOT Budget Highlights volumes, read in full, request **$165.0 million** for FAA Research, Engineering and Development — against $280 million actual in FY2025 and $290 million enacted for FY2026, a cut of roughly 43 percent — while keeping the program and describing it approvingly ("$165.0 million is requested for FAA's applied research on new and advanced technologies", with named investments of $15.7 million in UAS integration, $10.0 million in phasing out leaded aviation fuel by 2030 and $3.5 million in commercial space safety). The Status does not move: the ask is to get *out of* the R&D business, not to spend less on it, and a Budget that proposes something else for the same object does not move the ask (§3b). The FY2027 volume is attached below as moved-nearby Evidence — real, dated, Primary, on the ask's object, and satisfying it in neither limb.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The instrument for this ask would be the elimination of the FAA’s Research, Engineering and Development account, or a Budget request to do so. The FY2027 Budget’s Department of Transportation chapter (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget_fy2027.pdf) lists DOT cuts and eliminations - transit right-sizing, EV chargers, Essential Air Service, RAISE - and does not mention FAA R&D; the FY2026 discretionary request (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf) increases FAA operations and facilities instead. Under the symmetric Budget rule in playbook section 3b, no request means no rung.
  • Corrected 2026-09-03. This note previously said transportation.gov “serves 403 to both curl and a browser User-Agent, so the DOT Budget Highlights volume could not be read”. Both volumes open on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs and were read in full; they are the source of the correction in the Status note. The read-queue row is answered. Dates: the FY2027 volume is dated from its page’s last-updated stamp of 2026-05-05 (the PDF’s own CreationDate is 2026-03-24), and the FY2026 volume from its page’s stamp of 2025-05-30.
  • FAA also carries a standing statutory research obligation under 49 U.S.C. § 44501(c), the National Aviation Research Plan; the latest published edition is FY2025–FY2029, filed in 2024, with nothing newer. Getting the FAA “out of the R&D business” would take a statutory change as well as a budgetary one.
Action
eliminate
Object
FAA research and development activities
ID
1735