Exactly four days after long-anticipated sequester
furloughs began for air-traffic controllers, Congress decided the furloughs
were not such a good idea after all. It also decided that perhaps it wasn’t a
problem caused by an administrator trying to showboat the evils of
across-the-board cuts but in fact a problem with the legislation that the
members of Congress had crafted themselves—legislation directing that
across-the-board cuts be taken from each program, project and activity within
the $7.5 billion appropriated for air-traffic operations.
The legislation that the House passed overwhelmingly
today would take funds from the Airport Improvement Fund—an account that
Congress had previously exempted from any across-the-board cuts altogether—and
redistribute it elsewhere within the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA,
thus ending the four-day-old crisis.
On one level, the traveling public should be pleased
that this absurd, self-created crisis has been defused. But why did it happen
in the first place, and why does Congress fail to address so many of the
looming crises that will soon confront the citizens it represents?
The comments made by various participants in the FAA
drama over the past few days are enlightening. A number of Republican lawmakers
argued that there was no need to furlough any of the 15,000 FAA controllers
because the agency has 47,000 total employees. The whole furlough problem could
be solved by simply by increasing layoffs in the non-controller workforce.
Ironically, the people offering this solution just
months earlier were attempting to alleviate the defense sequestration cuts by
larger cuts in nondefense programs. Now they seem to recognize for the first
time that there are non-defense activities of the government that actually do
matter to people. But what were these 32,000 non-controllers at the FAA doing?
What would happen if we increased their furlough days in order to eliminate
furlough days for the controllers?
It turns out that about 15,000 of those employees
install, maintain, and service the equipment used by air-traffic controllers
and airline pilots. How much equipment are we talking about here? The FAA has
radar, radio relays, transmitters, and other electronic equipment operating at
more than 64,000 locations across the United States. Failure to maintain that
equipment could be as catastrophic to the safe and orderly functioning of our
air-transportation system as the understaffing of control towers.
How about the rest of the employees? Well, there are
another 7,500 who work in what is called “Aviation Safety.” Some of these
people inspect and certify aircrafts and aircraft equipment before it can be
put into service by the airlines. Others monitor airplane maintenance by the
airlines and certify the training programs and procedures of the airlines in
ensuring proper maintenance of the planes that carry the traveling public
hundreds of millions of air miles each day.
The fact that all of the uproar over the FAA
furloughs was centered on the controllers and not those who ensure proper
aircraft maintenance is a measure of how the current congressional
decision-making process is nothing more than a series of knee-jerk reactions to
whatever problems happen to make it onto the evening news. And those problems
may very well be less of a real threat to our safety and well-being than others
that we have not heard about.
The game that Congress is now playing is to impose
serious cutbacks across thousands of programs, projects, and activities of the
government and then figure out which to restore based on press reports and
public outrage.
What will be the next item that Congress will have
to fix to deflect the public’s wrath? Maybe it will be the growing lines that
airline passengers will face to get through airport security due to the hiring
freeze and inability of the Transportation Security Administration to pay for
the overtime necessary to surge their workforce at peak travel times. Perhaps
it will be a salmonella outbreak in certain fruits or vegetables because
Congress responded to the meat industry’s demand to prevent furloughs at the
Department of Agriculture but would not do the same for the Food and Drug
Administration, which is responsible for all other food products. Maybe an
early season hurricane will expose the degradation of the U.S. Weather
Service’s data-collection capabilities.
Maybe the press will turn their attention to the
fact that more than 70 percent of the staff at military hospitals are civilians
and subject to furlough. It is obvious that all of those hospitals are at
serious risk of not mueting minimal standards for cleanliness, safety, and
quality of care. Perhaps an unexpected slowdown in construction starts will be
linked to the growing backlog of unapproved multifamily mortgage applications
at the Federal Housing Administration. Maybe we will have an early start to the
wildfire season in the western United States, and the hazard posed by the lack
of training and preparation already occurring in federal firefighting efforts
will be linked to the possible unnecessary loss of millions of acres of
forestland and dozens of communities caught in the path of wildfires. Perhaps
the furlough of epidemiologists and other health professionals at the Centers
for Disease Control will become a topic of public concern with the spread of a
new generation of viruses or other infectious diseases.
The one thing you can be sure of, however, is that
Congress is not examining these problems in advance and looking at issues
across the government in a way that will allow them to be anticipated and
resolved before they begin to create enough pain and inconvenience. But with a
work schedule that requires them to be in Washington only a few full days a
month, how could it?
About the author: Scott Lilly is a Senior Fellow at
the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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