Alarm bells are going off for lawmakers after some of the nation’s busiest airports experienced scores of delays over the weekend due to air traffic control staffing shortages as the government shutdown prepares to enter its fourth week.
Air-traffic controllers are among the federal workers deemed essential, forcing them to continue on the job while not receiving paychecks.
Lawmakers are closely watching the weekend’s woes and increasing possibility of “sick-outs” by controllers, well-aware that travel delays could be the issue that forces them to the negotiating table.
“It most certainly will not get better with age,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “The longer the shutdown goes on, the more people are going to be frustrated and we’ve got people that are going without paychecks — they most certainly aren’t going to get happier.”
“You’re going to find more of them trying to find a way to express their frustration even though that they know that there are real implications to calling in sick and slowing things down,” Rounds said.
“And I get it.”
Unlike other parts of the federal workforce, air traffic controllers could have a say in ending the three-week long shutdown — but at a major cost.
Travel delays are among the shutdown effects felt most directly by average Americans, and the absence of fewer than a dozen controllers helped force the government to reopen in 2019 as it prompted a ground stoppage of flights at LaGuardia Airport in New York.
“Air traffic controllers had a pretty powerful punch,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said of those actions.
