The Aviation Safety Budget Went Up. The Inspector Corps Didn't.

Every commercial aircraft that flies in the United States does so because a federal inspector signed off on it — its design, its production line, its maintenance record, the airline that operates it.▸ That signature is the entire premise of American aviation safety. The office that supplies it, the FAA's Aviation Safety organization (AVS), has a growing budget and a workforce that isn't growing to match it.

AVS is the FAA directorate that certifies aircraft, engines, pilots, mechanics, and repair stations, and inspects the airlines that operate them.▸ Its money comes from the "Operations" account of the FAA's annual appropriation, and that account has been climbing. The FY 2026 FAA budget requests $1,876,039,000 for AVS — up from $1,745,532,000 enacted in FY 2024, a 7.5% increase over two years, alongside 156 additional funded positions (7,630 to 7,786 FTE).

Three of every five dollars — $1.05 billion of the $1.75 billion total — funds Flight Standards Service, the office that houses the inspectors who watch airlines and general aviation day to day.▸ Aircraft Certification Service, which signs off on new airplane and engine designs, gets another $351 million. On paper, the money keeps growing to match a growing, increasingly complex aviation system: more aircraft, more drones, more advanced air mobility applicants queued for certification.

Money funds positions; it does not fill them.▸ In fiscal 2025, per the FAA's own Aviation Safety Oversight and Certification Workforce Plan, the agency hired 338 Aviation Safety Inspectors (ASIs) — the frontline staff who inspect airlines, repair stations, and aircraft — and lost 424 of them to retirement and attrition. That's a net loss of 86 inspectors in a single year, even as the AVS budget was climbing. Aviation Safety Engineers (ASEs), who certify new aircraft designs, saw slower losses but a comparably tight labor market. For FY 2026, the FAA is now planning to hire aggressively — 351 ASIs and 90 ASEs, a 50% jump in planned ASE hiring over the prior year — just to outrun the attrition its own model predicts.

The FAA's own plan calls this a "challenging hiring environment" for inspectors and engineers alike, competing against private-sector aerospace pay.▸ The agency's answer is a bigger hiring class every year through 2035. Whether that class arrives before the gap widens further is the open question the plan itself does not answer.

The national numbers are an average.▸ The Department of Transportation Inspector General's 2026 audit of FAA oversight of United Airlines' maintenance (Report AV2026014) shows what the shortfall looks like at a single office. As of July 2025, the Certificate Management Office (CMO) responsible for United had 74 of its 111 authorized inspector and support positions filled — 37 seats, a third of the office, empty.

Operations inspectors — who oversee flight crew training and procedures — were hit hardest: 23 of 53 authorized seats empty, a 43% vacancy rate.▸ The OIG traced a direct consequence to the aircraft floor: the CMO has only one avionics and one maintenance Partial Program Manager, plus two assistants, overseeing roughly 521 Boeing 737s — more than half of United's fleet. That same office assigns three inspectors to just 53 Boeing 767s. Four inspectors on the 737 fleet, the IG found, oversee more than double the aircraft the CMO's Airbus inspectors are responsible for. In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, the report found, the CMO could not complete all its required maintenance inspections for United's essential maintenance providers.

Budget figures are FAA Operations-account appropriations for the Aviation Safety line only, not FAA's total budget. Vacancy and hiring figures come from two different points in FY2025 (a single CMO snapshot in July 2025; national ASI hires/losses for the full fiscal year) and are not additive.