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

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Review airline foreign ownership and control limits, changing statutes if needed

Not started

630 19. Department of Transportation

“Review foreign ownership and control limitations and, if necessary, work with Congress to change existing statutes.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No review of the 25 percent foreign voting-stock limit or of the actual-control test in 49 U.S.C. 40102(a)(15) and 41102 was found, and no bill to change those statutes was identified in the 119th Congress. A full-text search of the Federal Register since 2025-01-20 for "foreign ownership" limited to the Transportation Department returns three documents, two of them MARAD citizenship rules for its own programs and one an unmanned-aircraft proposal; "actual control" returns none. The FCC's foreign-ownership proceedings of 2025-06-23 and 2026-04-09 concern broadcast, common-carrier and aeronautical radio licensees, not airline ownership. The negative now also reaches the responsible office's own description of its work. DOT's Office of Aviation Analysis page, last updated 2025-05-23 and read on 2026-09-03, describes four divisions and their standing functions. Its only reference to ownership is the Air Carrier Fitness Division's routine licensing determination that applicants are "fit, willing, and able" and "are U.S. citizens as defined by the transportation statute", involving analysis of "the ownership of the applicant" — the office applying 49 U.S.C. 40102(a)(15) case by case, as it always has. The Competition and Policy Analysis Division's described outputs are mergers, alliances, code-shares, antitrust immunity, route selection and industry trend studies; the words "foreign ownership" and "actual control" appear on the page zero times, and no review, study, docket, RFI or announced re-examination of the limits is named anywhere on it.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The ask is the review, which is within DOT’s own gift, and it was not done in any way that reached an allowlisted source. requires_congress was cleared on 2026-09-01 in the ticket-26 phase-2 sweep: the statutory change the Quote mentions is conditional on the review’s outcome (“if necessary”), which is the downstream contingency playbook §3b says the flag does not record. The Status is unchanged.
  • Corrected 2026-09-03. This note previously recorded the Office of Aviation Analysis pages as “unreadable (403 to curl with a browser User-Agent and to WebFetch)”. They are readable on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs; the page is now the item’s Evidence. The read-queue row is answered. It evidences a state — “this office describes no such review” — which is what playbook §5 says an agency page of this kind can support.
  • Reach of the negative, per §3b: it covers Federal Register rulemaking, the bill record, the responsible office’s published description of its own work, and DOT’s own press-release archive. transportation.gov/newsroom/press-releases?keys=… is a working full-text search — it was control-tested on 2026-09-03, returning ten releases for “safety”, four for “joint venture” and none for the nonsense term zzqxwrflub — and it returns no release at all for “foreign ownership” or for “actual control”. An internal DOT review that has produced no public artefact would be invisible to every one of those routes; the negative is about published agency description and public statements.
  • Background, pre-window and therefore not Evidence: GAO-19-540R, U.S. Airlines: Information on DOT’s Oversight of and Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Foreign Ownership (2019), remains the last published examination of the question.
  • Queries are recorded in docs/research/ch-19.md under “Cluster negative search — aviation economic policy (pp. 630–631)”.
Action
expand
Object
Foreign ownership and control limitations on U.S. airlines
ID
1727