On October 16, the Transportation Department’s Inspector General announced an audit of the test that decides who gets to become an air traffic controller.
Congress ordered it. The same law told the FAA to review the test first, and the public record does not say whether the FAA ever finished.
The test is the Air Traffic Skills Assessment, or ATSA. Anyone without prior controller experience has to pass it, and most of the FAA’s new hires come through that door, according to GAO.
A Deadline That Passed Without a Press Release
Section 417 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 gave the agency 180 days from May 16, 2024 to review the ATSA and revise it if necessary. By our count, that deadline fell around November 12, 2024.
The review had three jobs. Evaluate every question, determine whether a peer-reviewed job analysis would improve hiring, and assess the assumptions, methods and scoring behind the test.
The Inspector General’s memo says the audit will assess the FAA’s evaluation of the ATSA and any actions that followed. It does not say whether that evaluation is finished.
In May 2025 testimony on implementing the Act, FAA officials said the agency was reviewing hiring, training, placement and Academy failures to confirm its selection methods work. The testimony does not mention Section 417.
The FAA’s 2026 to 2028 controller workforce plan cites a different provision, Section 437, several times. We found no reference to Section 417 in it.
Inference, resting on those two documents: the agency’s public accounts of its work under the Act do not describe a completed ATSA review. That is not proof the review does not exist. It may have been finished and never announced.
A January 2025 NATCA notice told controllers the FAA was conducting a job analysis, through a contractor called PDRI, to develop a new version of the ATSA. GAO reported in December 2025 that officials planned to have the new test ready in 2026.
That looks like a rebuild. A rebuild is not a report to Congress, and the two are not interchangeable.
A Promise Dated October 2023
This is the second time the Inspector General has examined the ATSA. In a January 2023 report, auditors found the FAA had taken reasonable steps in developing the test but had no plan to evaluate whether it picks people who succeed.
The numbers were thin. Of about 1,000 people who had taken the ATSA and graduated from the Academy since fiscal year 2018, 126 had reached certification. The OIG blamed the long training pipeline and COVID, which is fair, and which also left the question unanswered.
The FAA concurred with the recommendation to evaluate the test’s effectiveness. It said it would finish its actions by October 31, 2023. The OIG marked the recommendation resolved but open.
More than two years after that date, GAO went looking. Its December 2025 report says FAA officials had considered comparing ATSA scores against certification outcomes but had been unable to, because three data systems lack a common identifier.
Inference, resting on the GAO finding and the FAA’s 2023 response: the analysis the OIG requested does not appear to have been done as of December 2025. GAO did not say what became of the recommendation, and we could not find its current status.
GAO did the arithmetic itself, with caveats. Using FAA data, it found that candidates scoring 85 or higher were certified or still in training at a 29 percent rate. Those scoring 80 to 84.9 came in at 9 percent. GAO called the analysis illustrative and noted that score thresholds varied over the period.
That is a point in the test’s favor. It is also work the agency that administers the test apparently could not do for itself.
A Test With a Past
Congress had reasons to ask. In 2014, the FAA discarded its hiring preference for college program graduates, removed roughly 3,000 people from its qualified-applicant register, and made a 62-question biographical test the first hurdle, according to the Ninth Circuit’s account in Rojas v. FAA.
Fewer than 10 percent of the 28,000 people who took it in 2015 passed. The same opinion records an FAA human resources official swearing that applicants had pooled their answers to reverse-engineer the scoring.
The FAA disputes the framing. In its response to a February 2017 Inspector General audit, the agency said diversity was not the primary reason for the new process. It also said college program graduates made up 58 percent of 2014 to 2015 hires, up from 53 percent in the prior decade.
The OIG did not pick a cause. It said the change did diminish the role of the college programs, and that the reviews behind it found both equal opportunity problems and other chances to improve hiring.
That audit found the 2014 rollout had no documented plan. The OIG did not assess the biographical test’s validity. The FAA missed its hiring goals by 174 controllers in fiscal 2014 and 427 in fiscal 2015. The FAA cited sequestration, the Academy’s closure and concerns about the process.
A separate OIG investigation examined the cheating claim. Its August 2016 report of investigation, which Bureaucracy Times reviewed, found that an FAA controller active in the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees organized a February 19, 2014 teleconference for members applying that week.
After being shown text messages and consulting counsel, he acknowledged explaining to each person how to answer questions that participants said came from the test. The report also says the FAA’s own security office did not develop information showing that HR employees gave members an improper advantage.
The OIG concluded the findings did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor. The five-page report does not address discipline, and the subject’s name is redacted.
Congress then passed the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016. It removed the biographical test for experienced controllers, some college program graduates and three categories of veterans, according to the FAA’s response to that audit.
The FAA’s 2018 workforce plan says the general-public pool still had to pass a biographical screen. The FAA replaced its older cognitive exam, the AT-SAT, with the ATSA in November 2016, according to the OIG.
The demand for a peer-reviewed job analysis comes from the same period. Sen. Mike Lee filed a bill carrying it in 2019, and Section 417 bears the same title as that bill’s section. The enacted version is softer: it asks the FAA only to determine whether such an analysis would help.
A class action over the 2014 process, Brigida v. Buttigieg, appears in DOT’s own litigation newsletter. We could not confirm its current status.
One thread runs through all of it. The 2017 audit found staff had to check three separate databases to learn one applicant’s status. It recommended a single tracking system, and the FAA said it would deliver by March 31, 2017. GAO reported in December 2025 that the FAA’s three applicant and training systems still lack a common identifier.
Inference, resting on those two reports: the same structural gap may have outlived the recommendation. The systems GAO named differ from the ones the OIG named, so this could be a new failure with the old shape. We could not find the recommendation’s current status.
Nothing here shows the ATSA shares the biographical test’s flaws. It is a different instrument. The history explains why the question keeps being asked.
The Gate Everyone Walks Through
The FAA is counting on that gate. Its workforce plan calls for hiring 2,200 controllers in fiscal 2026, 2,300 in 2027 and 2,400 in 2028.
As of April 2026 the FAA had roughly 11,000 certified controllers and 4,000 more in the pipeline. The Inspector General’s memo singles out shortages at the New York TRACON and Miami Tower.
The FAA’s own facility table agrees. As of September 2025, New York had 112 certified controllers against a target of 160, and Miami Tower had 59 against 90.
GAO followed the roughly 4,000 people from its fiscal 2017 to 2022 applicant group who began Academy training. About 43 percent were no longer controllers or trainees by 2024.
The FAA’s plan projects 743 Academy dropouts in fiscal 2026, rising to 775 by 2028. That is the largest single line in its loss forecast.
Inference, resting on the FAA’s December 2022 response to the OIG: the FAA described the ATSA there as a tool for identifying applicants most likely to complete training. By that definition, Academy and training attrition are the natural yardstick, and the FAA’s own plan treats them as its biggest drain.
Whether the ATSA predicts that well enough is what the 2023 recommendation asked the FAA to measure. Whether the FAA finished the Section 417 review, closed that recommendation, or deployed a replacement test are questions this record does not answer.
The Inspector General says fieldwork begins in the coming weeks at FAA headquarters. The gate, meanwhile, stays open.
