American Morning
FAA funding the latest casualty of political infighting in Washington
The U.S. Senate went on summer recess Tuesday night following the vote on debt ceiling legislation without taking action to fully fund the Federal Aviation Administration.
As a result, 4,000 aviation workers have been furloughed today and the FAA has had to shut down airport construction projects across the country, leaving up to 70,000 workers idle for the next five weeks. The U.S. government is also likely to lose more than $1 billion in airline ticket taxes.
This morning, Michael Goldfarb, former FAA chief of staff, talks with Ali Velshi about why funding the FAA has become a partisan issue and explains if the furloughs will impact airport safety.
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I am one of those furloughed FAA workers. Let me set some numbers straight... we are not only talking about the 4000 federal employees, but basically every commercial company involved in the aviation business is hit by this a in big way. Their work stops as well, since there is no federal oversight/direction (those feds have been furloughed) they cannot continue to work. This will cascade trough the whole industry... This is a lot more than 4000 feds and 70k construction workers, there are Boeing engineers, Lockheed computer programmers out of work too...(the list goes on, to basically every large corporation). This will have a massive trickle down effect.
Our dear politicians should not get paid because they missed the deadline to clean up this mess and went on vacation, that's how it works for the rest of us!