‘not Meeting The Moment’: Faa Frustrated With Contractor Leading Air Traffic Control Overhaul

Federal Aviation Administration officials are raising concerns about the performance of a contractor overseeing the Trump administration’s overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control system — unhappiness that could result in scaling back the company’s role, three people familiar with the situation told POLITICO.

The friction comes just eight months after Peraton, a Herndon, Virginia-based contractor with little prior experience working with the FAA, won a $1.5 billion contract to oversee the work, which was spurred in part by the deadly January 2025 midair crash over Washington. The company’s role is to lead coordination on the modernization effort.

The three people, including two industry officials and a person familiar with the project, were granted anonymity to discuss Peraton’s relationship with the FAA. Two of those people said they had heard directly from FAA officials about the agency's frustrations with Peraton, including the prospect of curtailing the contractor’s role. One official described instances in which they said the contractor failed to manage subcontractors at a work site and let schedules slip on a project in Alaska.

“The big issues here are threefold,” said the person familiar with discussions, adding that “Peraton has basically not done any work since they got in.” The person said the agency was partially at fault, too, saying the agency has stonewalled Peraton’s efforts to work seamlessly with FAA counterparts.

FAA spokesperson Hannah Walden said in a statement that the agency is “making unprecedented progress” on key initiatives on the new air traffic control system.

“As with any once-in-a-generation project, the FAA and its partners want to deliver historic results for the American people, so we hold each other accountable,” she said. Walden added that the FAA has not penalized Peraton for underperformance or issued a “cure letter” — a formal warning from the government that a contractor’s performance problems could put the contract at risk.

Peraton did not directly answer questions about concerns surrounding its relationship with the FAA, but said in a statement that it is “a proud, trusted partner in the FAA’s historic effort to modernize America's air traffic control system.”

The company added that it is “working side-by-side with their team every day, and fully committed to delivering results, meeting milestones, and supporting the FAA's mission. The progress being made is real, and Peraton is honored to play a critical role in making it happen for the American people.”

But the person familiar with the project said this was not the case. “It’s what they’re not doing — they’re not managing the project,” they said. “And that’s the problem."

Doughnuts and delays

The modernization effort is under intense scrutiny as it comes after last year’s deadly midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which killed 67 people, and amid a fresh string of incidents and close calls, including this year’s fatal runway crash at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The two accidents have made 2025-26 the deadliest two-year stretch for U.S. airline travel in two decades.

The effort also comes with the baggage of the FAA’s previous modernization push, known as NextGen, which took more than two decades and billions of dollars to deliver pieces of a system that never fully lived up to its promise to streamline and connect dozens of major systems and develop new software, among other initiatives.

In May 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled the ambitious plan to overhaul major parts of the aviation system, aiming to improve safety while preparing the national airspace for the expected growth of technologies such as drones and commercial spacecraft.

The FAA got $12.5 billion in last year’s GOP-led megalaw for the project, though Duffy has been asking Capitol Hill for up to an additional $20 billion. The FAA says it has already made significant progress on the modernization effort, including the replacement of 62 percent of dated copper wiring at air traffic facilities with fiber, new surface-awareness technology at 96 towers, the conversion of 380 radio sites and other major upgrades.

Peraton, which works primarily on national security programs and had limited experience with the FAA, won the contract in December to serve as the project’s “lead systems integrator.” The company is responsible for coordinating the contractors and technologies that will underpin the agency’s broader modernization effort.

Multiple problems have arisen since then, said the three people who spoke to POLITICO, as well as a fourth person — a former FAA employee — with knowledge of the situation.

The person familiar with the relationship said the FAA has been micromanaging the project, which has influenced how it interacts with Peraton — a reflection of agency career employees' skepticism of the contractor. Those restrictions have created additional constraints on an already complicated effort. And given the Trump administration’s ambition to get large parts of the system up and running by 2028, the set timelines and deliverables are difficult for Peraton to meet, the person added.

In one case, a Peraton manager showed up to a radar site that was being worked on, and instead of ensuring that the subcontractors were carrying out their duties, brought doughnuts and sat in the corner the entire time, one industry official with knowledge of the incident told POLITICO. The sentiment among subcontractors and working technicians, the official said, was “why is somebody here babysitting us that doesn't know anything and doesn't do anything? The government [is] spending money on a resource that is not providing value.”

The official conceded, however, that in some of these cases, the FAA still wants to be in the driver’s seat — and is “just not letting” Peraton be as involved or “telling them what to do.”

The official said there have also been instances of schedules slipping. For example, Peraton delayed decisions surrounding construction on a facility in Alaska — a problem in a place where waiting too long can mean losing months of work because of the weather, the official said.

In a follow-up statement, Peraton did not address those specific allegations, only to add, “the program remains on track and any comments to the contrary are false.”

“There is no daylight between the FAA and Peraton in our collective effort to deliver the most transformative government modernization program in our nation’s history. With 330,000 independent projects and a half-million dependencies, individual project tasks can shift and fluctuate,” said a company spokesperson.

While it may be a sophisticated company in several aspects like national security, Peraton “is not sophisticated with how the FAA works, they're not sophisticated with the stakeholders and … they're being asked to sprint immediately,” the person familiar with the issue said.

The industry official who described the doughnuts incident said Peraton’s progress is “not meeting the moment” for the scope of its work.

'Ridiculously fast'

Peraton has been tasked with delegating and managing nearly a dozen “work streams,” or specific parts of the project agreed upon within its contract with the FAA — not the entire modernization effort. Several subcontractors are involved in the modernization effort, including L3 Harris, RTX and AT&T.

Industry officials previously said that Peraton faced a difficult task given the scale and speed of the FAA’s modernization effort. With so much of the program still taking shape, Peraton has an uphill battle just trying “to figure out how they work with the FAA,” another industry official said in April.

Even given the agency’s struggles with Peraton thus far, the industry official who described the doughnuts incident underscored “what's been done in the last six months or eight months even is ridiculously fast by FAA standards.”

When promoting how far the Trump administration has come since announcing the brand new air traffic control system overhaul last year, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford has emphasized that the agency and its lead contractor must work in lockstep.

“Peraton, think of them as an extension of me,” Bedford said during an April appearance with Duffy and others. “They speak with the voice of the administrator. … They are quarterbacking the project from here on out.”