Excellent point. The flying public pays for this directly. There were 730 million people who flew a US based carrier last year. The FAA budget is in the $15 billion area. This amounts to about $20 per ticket. The whole system should be privatized, using ticket taxes to cover it. And I bet the FAA could monetize in other ways too.
This is what is called "Baseline Budgeting!" This is what the taxpaying public does NOT understand.
When Congress or the President speaks of "cuts" or cutting this or that budget item, what they mean is spending less than the 10% they had projected to spend, namely the 10% extra that government employees had expected to get!
That's not how you make your budget, is it?
You start at zero and then figure what you need to cut back on, you don't automatically add 10% extra on every item, then cut back and claim that you've "slashed and burned through your budget!"
That is why, if every program, even those that are duplicates and triplicates (some as many as 35 times as many) programs only got what the rest of the taxpayers get each and every year, the budget would balance within time, without cutting anything at all!