In the legislative fight over five-year reauthorization for the FAA, airlines and other interests had a Christmas tree of of wish lists items they worked hard to get. It’s a $105 billion bill that more than doubles subsidies for small community air service, and makes it harder to track private planes belonging to wealthy individuals.

Among many other things, in a victory for Delta over United (which operates a competing hub at Washington Dulles airport) it included 5 new “beyond-perimeter” slot pairs at Washington National airport, that permit flights farther than 1,250 miles. The authors of the bill didn’t just say there could be more flying, and to destinations currently reserved for Dulles airport, they outlined who should get those flights.

• They had to go to existing big airlines, and couldn’t be given to new competitors. After all, this is who lobbied for the bill.
  
• 4 go to ‘non-limited incumbents’ and 1 pair to a ‘limited incumbent’ and none to ‘new entrants’ at the airport. However the Department of Transportation screwed up which airlines qualify in each category.
  
• So the Senate committee chair responsible for the bill actually wrote a letter to make clear which carriers were supposed to get the slots in case there had been any misunderstanding.

The law spelled out that DOT had 60 days to assign the slots with no delay, once the bill was enacted.

• President Biden signed the legislation on May 16th. That means, by law, FAA should have granted the slots two months later.

• Five and a half weeks after the bill was signed, DOT began taking requests from airlines for the five slot pairs, and set a deadline of July 8 for them to respond. They allowed comments on those applications until July 17, which was already past the legally allowed 60 days for the agency to act.

It’s now been more than twice as long as congress authorized for DOT to assign these new beyond-perimeter slots, and they still have not done so.

Of course, agencies miss congressionally-mandated deadlines all the time. There’s very little consequence for doing so! The agency could be sued. A court could order them to expedite their process. Otherwise, though, the deadline doesn’t have tremendous teeth to it.

And normally heavily regulated businesses are careful not to publicly criticize their regulator, although recently Delta CEO Ed Bastian publicly ripped into Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for calling out the airline’s performance when it melted down at the end of July.

Delta seems to be getting its way with its continued Aeromexico joint venture, though their regulator said that partnership would not get re-authorized. They aren’t going to want to open up a three-front war with 1200 New Jersey Avenue.