Senate Votes Unanimously for FAA Fix

The U.S. Senate voted April 25 to ease the Federal Aviation Administration's sequestration stranglehold, which has forced furloughs of air traffic controllers, snarled air travel across the board, and forced tower closures at 149 smaller airports around the country, including Nashua Airport.

The "Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013" (full text uploaded here) will provide a temporary fix, if approved today by Congress.

CNN reports the bill gives the FAA authority to divert up to $253 million from other areas of its existing budget to keep employees on the job and make sure flights are on time.

It would also relieve the funding cuts that would shut down air traffic control towers at 149 airports around the country, including Nashua Airport's Boire Field.

In order to pass the House a two-thirds majority is required. 

In a White House press briefing on April 24, White House spokesman Jay Carney fielded a question on the FAA furlough situation. Below is the transcript from tha part of the briefing, in which Carney redirects a question asking if the President was allowing the sequester to be "as disruptive as possible to score political points.":

Q.    Jay, as I’m sure you’re aware, and you touched on this yesterday, the President is accused of making the effects of the sequester as disruptive as possible to score political points, particularly with regard to the air traffic controllers.  Is the White House doing everything it can to minimize these disruptions?  Or does it feel in some way that the discomfort helps to make his point about the sequester? 

MR. CARNEY:  Let’s be clear:  The sequester was a law written by Congress.  Congress wrote the law.  Congress passed the law.  Members of Congress should read the law.  The law does not allow for the kind of flexibility when it comes to the FAA budget that some of these members -- Republicans, principally -- all claim it has.  They should read the law.  They wrote it, they should know what’s in it.  They passed it, they voted for it, they should know what’s in it.

The fact is the FAA has initiated a series of cost-saving measures, both personnel and non-personnel related, including a hiring freeze, restrictions on travel, termination of certain temporary employees, and reductions to contracts.  But the law specifically walls off three-quarters of the department’s budget from sequestration and does not give the department any flexibility to mitigate the impact on the FAA.  Why?  Because it was written to be a bad law.  It was written to be as onerous as possible.  And this is a truth that applies all across the impacts of the sequester.  Seventy percent, as I said, of the FAA’s budget, operations budget, is personnel.  So even after taking all of the measures that the FAA took to cut costs, they have to furlough 47,000 employees for up to 11 days between now and the end of the fiscal year. 

Now, look, when it comes to the FAA and the travel delays that we have seen, we are absolutely concerned about this terrible effect of the sequester.  That's why two months ago the Secretary of Transportation stood before you in this room and warned of these looming effects and called on Congress to act to avert them.

Unfortunately, instead of acting to avert them and to delay the sequester or eliminate it through the kind of broad-based, bipartisan, balanced deficit reduction that the country supports, Republicans in Congress made a political, tactical decision to embrace the sequester.  They did and they declared it a victory.  They said it's a victory for the tea party.  It's a home run for the Republican Party. 

It's slightly ironic that -- and you never hear them mention this -- but they should also read the budget that they passed in the House of Representatives.  The Ryan budget cuts -- if the dramatic, non-defense discretionary cuts envisioned in that budget were applied across the board -- because of course they're not identified in the Ryan budget -- but if they were just applied across the board, the cuts to the FAA would be three times the size of the sequester budget reductions.  Three times.  That's what they voted for.  That's what they want to become the law of the land.

And it's not just the FAA.  The same dramatic, steep cuts in services for children, for seniors; the same kind of harm that we're seeing from the sequester -- eliminating children from Head Start, eliminating access to Meals on Wheels programs for seniors -- just multiplied and made worse.  That's the budget they voted for.

Now, when Secretary LaHood was out here warning of these problems, the Republicans instead in Congress were saying, you know what, no, the sequester is a good thing.  We want it.  We would rather have the sequester take effect than ask millionaires and billionaires to pay a little bit more to help reduce our deficit in a balanced way.  That was the choice they made.  Now, we share the frustration, and we warned about these very problems.  And we think those members of Congress who haven't read the law that they voted for and passed ought to read it.  But they also, more importantly, ought to take action to do away with the sequester so that we don't suffer these consequences.