Restructure the FAA's funding system off annual appropriations

Research notes

• Boundary call, raised in the spot-check register: the alternative reading is partial, on the ground that $12.5 billion of FAA money is now genuinely insulated from the annual cycle. It is recorded as not started because the Quote asks to completely restructure the funding system, and a four-year mandatory appropriation for one modernization program leaves the system itself untouched - the FY2026 Act still funds FAA Operations, Facilities and Equipment and RE&D year by year and adds new reporting conditions on the section 40003 money (P.L. 119-75 sec. 119J). That is playbook section 3b’s “progress is measured on this ask” applied to money.
• Confirmed 2026-09-03 against both DOT Budget Highlights volumes, read in full. Neither proposes any change to how the FAA is funded: no user fee, no new trust fund, no conversion to mandatory spending. “User fee” appears in the FY2027 volume only as the PHMSA offset line and in a discretionary-offsets subtotal, and the phrase “Airport and Airway Trust Fund” appears in neither narrative. The sharpest evidence is the contrast inside the same document: the FY2027 Budget does propose a funding restructuring, for a different mode — “a series of major proposals to restore the Nation’s maritime dominance, starting with the creation of a Maritime Security Trust Fund”, providing “$1.4 billion in new dedicated resources” for the Maritime Administration. The administration knows how to ask Congress for a trust-fund restructuring, and it did so for MARAD and not for the FAA. The volume is cited on #1735; it is recorded here rather than attached because #1735 is where it does its work as Evidence, and lending one instrument to two asks on adjacent pages is the same-instrument drift §3b warns about.
• The FY2027–2031 FAA investment plan required by P.L. 119-75 — “not later than 30 days after submission of the budget request, the Secretary of Transportation shall transmit to the Congress an investment plan for the Federal Aviation Administration which includes funding for each budget line item for fiscal years 2027 through 2031” — is not published anywhere reachable, so its funding targets could not be recorded. FAA’s Capital Investment Plan page (faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/cip, last updated 2026-04-08) still lists the 2024 edition, FY2025–2029, as the current plan, and FAA’s Reports to Congress index lists three 2026 reports required by P.L. 119-75 and no investment plan. The statute requires transmittal to Congress, not publication, so this is a publication gap rather than a wall: it can be said that the plan is not public, not that it was never transmitted.
• Corpus bill-title search over 18,500 bills found no FAA funding-structure measure; the air traffic bills are workforce, tower-naming and modernization measures.