New Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy reports that he’s spoken to Elon Musk’s DOGE team, and invited them to help fix U.S. aviation systems.

Big News – Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) February 5, 2025

DOGE – the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – has been controversial because significant authority appears to have been delegated to unelected individuals. Of course, significant authority is already held by unelected individuals, bureaucrats inside agencies. And it’s controversial because of the unconventional and impolite approach to institutions that it’s taken. They’ve declared that payments being made by the government are improper, moved to cancel contracts, and declared entire agencies (like USAID) on the chopping block.

Much of their work is likely to be stymied by the courts. I never bet against Elon Musk – he’s accomplished impossible things, from reinventing the electric car industry to sending rocket ships into space, and also creates chips let let human brains control machines. But he also makes bold claims that may not come to fruition. That’s part of willing a different world into existence.

My hunch is that he meets his match in the government bureaucracy. Milton Friedman described the idea of changing government’s nature as akin to barking cats,

What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’ …The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of governmental agencies once they are established. The way the FDA now behaves, and the adverse consequences, are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.

Nonetheless, moving quickly is an important tactic and it’s worth considering not whether they achieve their stated objectives but whether they can actually overcome inertia and make some things function better. Put another way, in 2016 Peter Thiel described the disconnect between voters and media on Donald Trump,

I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. … I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally.

And the same is likely true of Musk’s efforts with DOGE. Towards that end, there are things that they could do which would actually make the Department of Transportation and FAA in particular more effective at their jobs.

• There aren’t enough air traffic controllers. That isn’t an accident. The FAA has known about this issue for 20 years. There aren’t enough seats in their training academies, and they could both build that out and rely more heavily on collegiate training programs. Administrator Whitaker talked about leaning into these programs more.

• They’re using antiquated technology, and that ties the hands of controllers behind their back. They have to look out at airfields instead of benefiting from data. They still move paper flight strips (and will well into the next decade under current FAA plans, even though Canada moved on from this in 2005).

• Procurement processes are very bad at FAA. They take everyone’s desired specs and put projects out to bid for custom software instead of buying off the shelf like most countries. It takes ages and winds up with buggy products. There is also an institutional bias against technological solutions to lack of controllers like remote towers for some airports.

• The bureaucracy is badly organized. FAA is both service provider for air traffic control, and its regulator. That’s a conflict that minimizes accountability. These functions could be separated out within the department.

These are things that DOGE could potentially fix! They don’t necessarily require legislation. They also don’t involve cuts.