An air traffic controller at the Opa-locka airport in Opa-locka, Florida. Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced his plan to privatize the air traffic controllers system, which would essentially hand over operations of the airways from the federal government to a nonprofit corporation. During an event Monday at the White House, Trump boasted that privatizing control of the nation's skyways will speed up modernization of the air traffic system, which has been slow to switch from radar to more precise — and efficient — GPS technology. "It's a broken, antiquated, horrible system," Trump said Monday to a group of airline executives. More from Vox:

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Nevada's legislature just passed a radical plan to let anybody sign up for Medicaid The nation's largest air carriers have been lobbying for such a change for years, but Republicans in Congress have failed to get enough support to pass a bill. Democrats have been resistant in handing over control of the airways to big businesses. Trump's interest gives renewed momentum to the idea. His plan is reportedly based on a bill introduced last year by Rep. Bill Shuster, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Trump says the plan would save taxpayers from funding air traffic operations and would be paid with "no tax money" at all. But the structure of the nonprofit corporation would give board members (mostly airline industry representatives and workers), broad leeway in raising prices on consumers to cover the cost of air traffic services. According to the Congressional Budget Office, such a plan (based on an analysis of Shuster's bill) would actually increase spending on air traffic services to speed up modernization efforts. It's very likely that under Trump's plan, consumers will continue footing most of the bill for these operations, which will now be more expensive. "Sooner or later air passengers will bear the burden of this expensive new entity in the form of more expensive air fare," wrote Andrew Langer, the president of the Institute for Liberty, a small libertarian think tank, in an op-ed in The Hill newspaper.

Who ends up paying

The Federal Aviation Administration currently employs about 14,000 highly trained air traffic controllers who monitor and direct airline traffic across the United States, making sure that one plane doesn't crash into another. Right now, consumers pay most of the cost through a 7.5 percent excise tax on airline tickets. That money goes to the federal Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which pays the salaries of air traffic controllers and their operations as part of the Federal Aviation Administration. At the beginning of fiscal year 2017, that trust fund had $14.7 billion dollars. Under Trump's plan, the FAA would no longer control air traffic, and would no longer tax travelers to pay for this service. Instead, it would hand over the system to a nonprofit corporation. Yet the new company is not exactly a private corporation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, which analyzed Shuster's bill, it would be a quasi-governmental agency, kind of like Fannie Mae or Amtrak. "It would effectively act as an agent of the federal government in carrying out a regulatory function," wrote Theresa Gullo, a budget analyst. Under Shuster's bill, oversight of the air traffic systems would be given to a 13-member board, made up mostly of commercial airline representatives and workers. They would then raise money to pay for air traffic control services by charging user fees and selling corporate bonds to investors. The corporation would charge airlines and other companies the fee, which they could easily pass on to consumers by raising the cost of airline tickets. Budget analysts believe that privatizing the system would actually cost more money. Shuster's bill, which inspired Trump's plan, would raise mandatory spending by $89 billion and increase the deficit by $19.8 billion over the next 10 years, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis. This is largely from the added cost of the needed equipment and technology to speed up the modernization process.

The controversy