The Federal Aviation Administration began furloughs of staff including air-traffic controllers last weekend, blaming cuts due to sequestration. For most of this week, the FAA has reported little impact at most major aiports: As I write this, its map of 40 major airports shows delays of more than 15 minutes at just four, and only one of them reported the reason for its delay as “staffing” (as opposed to something like maintenance or weather). That was the case earlier this week, too.
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But there have been some delays. And if you are sitting at the airport, waiting out a sequester-related flight delay and wondering who to blame, look first and foremost to the White House. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal explains:
Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA’s budget through 17 airline taxes and fees — about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can’t deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.
Ponder this logic, if that’s the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won’t arrive on time.
The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travellers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama’s “passenger bill of rights,” the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. But sauce for the goose is apparently an open bar for the FAA gander.
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p style=”padding-left:30px;”>The White House claims the sequester applies to the budget category known as “projects, programs and activities” and thus it lacks flexibility. Not so: This is a political pose to make the sequester more disruptive. Legally speaking, the sequester applies at a more general level known as “accounts.” The air traffic account includes 15,000 controllers out of 31,000 employees. The White House could keep the controllers on duty simply by allocating more furlough days to these other non-essential workers.
There’s more where that came from, including the administration’s failure to prioritize major air-travel hubs over less-busy places and the FAA’s continued reliance on old technology despite cost overruns to update said technology in recent years that nearly equal the amount cut via sequestration — including bonuses paid to a contractor even though work wasn’t completed on time. The technical question about budget categories, and which level the cuts have to be made in, is something we’ve covered here before.
But the key figure to note is that the FAA is limited to its 2010 budget at a time when the number of flights in the U.S. has continued its steady decline — including a fall of about 5 percent since 2010. Why should cutbacks bite so hard at an agency that is monitoring less activity than the last time its budget was this size? Isn’t that one of the justifications for charging passenger fees that make up such a large part of the FAA’s budget: so that the agency won’t be such a burden on taxpayers, and so that air travel won’t be subject as much to the whims of Washington budget writers?
This choice by the Obama administration is the same as the well-known Washington Monument Syndrome — except that there’s far less economic impact from closing a tourist site compared to potentially disrupting a major industry such as air travel. It’s reflective of the many reasons faith in the federal government is at an all-time low. And it’s shameful.