Top FAA execs lack institutional knowledge, says official; agency must be prepared for cuts

Turnover of top executives at the Federal Aviation Administration has led to a lack of institutional knowledge at the agency, said Toni Trombecky, a 31 year veteran of the agency serving out her final months there.

"It's not that they're making bad decisions--they're making uninformed decisions, because they don't have all the information that previous executives had," said Trombecky, while speaking Jan. 20 at an event hosted by the Association of Government Accountants, in Washington, D.C. Trombecky, the manager of FAA strategic planning, has accepted a job as deputy performance improvement officer at the Veterans Affairs Department.

The FAA, she noted, is in the midst of an extensive modernization effort known as NextGen; official estimates of the program's cost place it at $40 billion.

Agency officials, she added, anticipate budget reductions that could cause them to cut programs now underway.

"We're looking at what do we stop doing, what are the programs that we shut down," she said. After the event, Trombecky said she doesn't know which efforts may be on the chopping block, but said the agency is prepared to shut down entire programs.

"When you do these salami slices, you get to a point in any organization, government or not, that you cannot do the salami slices anymore. You have to make the tough decision of what programs, what things, got to get done," she said.

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