The NTSB's Operating Budget Is Flat for a Second Year. Its Staff Is Down 29.

On February 12, 2026, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy testified before the Senate Commerce Committee to deliver the board's final report on the January 29, 2025 midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac, which killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft.▸ The report ran to 50 numbered safety recommendations. Nine months earlier, the NTSB had also opened an investigation into UPS Airlines Flight 2976, whose engine separated on takeoff from Louisville and killed 15 people — the deadliest crash in the cargo carrier's history — a case still active when the board held a public hearing on it in May 2026. The NTSB is a small agency that is asked to do this kind of work on every serious transportation accident in the country, in every mode. Its own budget requests to Congress show it doing that work with fewer people than it had two years ago.

The NTSB's fiscal 2027 budget request, submitted to Congress on April 3, 2026, asks for $187 million.▸ Of that, $145 million is the same operating request the agency made for fiscal 2026 — flat, dollar for dollar. The remaining $42 million is a one-time, non-recurring ask to replace the leases on NTSB's Washington headquarters and its public hearing center, both at L'Enfant Plaza. By the agency's own accounting in the submission, that relocation bill "would represent more than 29 percent of the FY 2026 annualized Continuing Resolution amount of $145.0 million." The document is blunt about the alternative: "Absent one-time funding for this critical requirement, the agency would be compelled to significantly reduce safety-related staffing levels."

The one-time relocation request is now the single largest line in the agency's budget — larger than Aviation Safety, the program that houses most of its accident investigators.▸ Every other program's FY2027 request sits within a few thousand dollars of its FY2026 level; about 74% of the agency's base budget, by its own tally, goes to employee compensation.

Set the one-time relocation aside and NTSB's core operating request has barely moved.▸ It rose modestly from $139.4 million in FY2024 to $143.8 million in FY2025, reached $145.0 million for FY2026, and was requested at that same $145.0 million again for FY2027 — a base budget flat for a second consecutive year, even as the agency's caseload grew. Its own letters to Congress make the workload plain: the FY2026 request (May 2025) described "the investigations of over 1,000 domestic transportation accidents and incidents"; the FY2027 request (April 2026) described "over 1,300 new domestic transportation accidents and incidents," plus support for "over 450 new foreign accident and incident investigations" and disaster assistance to "over 3,600" survivors, family members, and family contacts.

Money aside, the agency told Congress directly that its workforce has shrunk.▸ Both budget letters use the same sentence structure a year apart: retirements, other departures, and "the federal civilian hiring freeze" took the NTSB from "a high of 445 employees in FY 2024" down to 412 by June 1, 2025, and to 416 by September 30, 2025 — the most recent count in either document. Both budgets still request funding for 450 positions. That's a gap of 34 unfilled positions against the ceiling Congress has already funded, even before counting "more departures anticipated" that both letters warn are still coming.

The agency's own words connect the two halves of this story directly: the same FY2027 letter that reports 416 employees also says "the vast majority of the agency's budget is devoted to our workforce," and that a full-year continuing resolution without the relocation money would force a reduction in "safety-related staffing levels."▸ A board that just closed out the highest-profile air-safety investigation of the decade, with a second major crash inquiry still open, is telling Congress its money and its people are both tighter than they were two years ago.

The "over 1,000" (FY2026 letter) and "over 1,300 new" (FY2027 letter) domestic-investigation figures use near-identical phrasing a year apart but aren't guaranteed to be a strictly like-for-like count — the later letter adds the word "new." Employee headcounts are point-in-time counts stated in NTSB's own transmittal letters, not FTE (a separate budgetary measure that stayed at 445 across both documents); "positions funded" is the budgeted ceiling, distinct from both.