This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties. I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary

This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties. I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea. In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible). While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed. [1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/FAA_FY_2026_Budget_Estimates_CJ.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...