March 10, 2023: The Biden administration seeks additional funding for the Federal Aviation Administration. These funds aim to boost the hiring of air traffic controllers and facilitate other better to manage increasingly congested airspace.

On Thursday, the White House proposed $16.5 billion for the firm, up from the $15.2 billion the FAA received in financial 2023.

The request would surge funding for the National Airspace System to $3.5 billion, starting from $500 million, improving the systems that oversee the country’s airspace “to safely adjust the growth in traditional commercial aviation traffic alongside the recent entrants from the commercial space, an aircraft, and advanced air mobility factories.”

The request, a portion of a broad budget proposal for the year 2024 fiscal year, comes below two months following a pilot-alert system outage that prompted the FAA to ground flights all over the nation for the initial time since 9/11.

Airlines and the Transportation Department have sparred regarding the causes of flight disruptions, with a few company executives blaming a small fall of air traffic controllers. In the previous year, Airlines scaled back their growth plans to put even more slack in their schedules as they grappled with a pilots and aircraft shortage.

President Joe Biden’s request highlights the increasing number of rocket launches by space firms as one of the issues on U.S. airspace. In the previous year, the FAA is managing airspace for a record 92 space missions, including rocket launches and spacecraft reentries, which it anticipates being the top in 2023.

Many of those missions are starting from Florida, which has seen more commercial air traffic.

Biden seeks a $3 million increase for consumer security work at the Transportation Department, which pushes airlines to formalize policies such as ensuring families can sit together without paying a fee and prompt refunds when things go wrong.