FAA Funding Impasse Resolved
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced an agreement Thursday afternoon that will end a stalemate over funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and allow 70,000 workers to return to work.
With public opinion of Congress at record lows after the prolonged debt limit crisis, Congress' latest intransigence threatened to frustrate Americans even more.
Funding for the FAA expired on July 22. After finishing work on the Budget Control Act, the bill that raised the debt ceiling and reduced budget deficits, Congress went on recess without passing a FAA authorization bill.
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Without the authorization bill, airport construction projects had been halted, furloughing 70,000 construction workers, and an additional 4,000 FAA employees. At least 40 FAA safety inspectors were expected to work without pay.
More importantly, the government would have been unable to collect taxes from airlines. If Congress had waited until after its recess, over $1 billion in revenue for the government would have been lost. Airlines, in the meantime, had raised their ticket prices to match their “tax holiday” instead of passing on the savings to consumers, which outraged many customers and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Two main issues led to the deadlock over FAA funding. The first issue had to do with unions. Democrats would like to make unionization easier for airline employees while Republicans would like to make it more difficult. Prior to 2010, airline employees who did not cast a ballot on the question of unionization were counted as “no” votes. The National Mediation Board issued a ruling in 2010 saying that non-votes would no longer be counted, thus making a vote in favor of unionization more likely. Republicans wanted to overturn that ruling.
The second issue had to do with subsidizing flights at rural airports. The Essential Air Service Program (EAS) subsidized flights at about 150 rural airports across the country at a cost of about $200 million. Republicans wanted to reduce or eliminate this program.
Interestingly, rural voters are more likely to vote Republican while urban voters are more likely to vote Democrat. House Republicans, therefore, are more likely to represent rural areas where plane ticket subsidies are more likely to get cut in the House bill. This suggests that the issue of government subsidies for airlines, and the associated costs to taxpayers, are of greater concern to House Republicans than their parochial interests.
In a Tuesday editorial for USA Today, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) argued that the EAS is important for rural communities and should be preserved.
“The EAS program has long been a lifeblood of economic development in rural America. It was Congress' promise that small and rural communities would not be abandoned when the airline industry was deregulated. Eliminating EAS today would take airline travel away from more than 150 small communities,” Rockefeller wrote.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a long time critic of wasteful government spending, argued in February speech on the Senate floor that the EAS is another example of government pork.
The $200 million spent on the EAS “may not be significant,” McCain said, “$200 million in light of a $1.5 trillion deficit this year is probably not a lot of money, but a lot of Americans on November 2 [2010] said they wanted us to stop spending things that are not absolutely essential. Although this program is called the Essential Air Service, in my view it’s far from essential.”
The Republican led House and Democratic led Senate both passed long term funding bills for the FAA, but since the two sides could not reconcile the unionization and EAS issues, neither body would agree to pass the same bill.
The House passed a short-term funding bill, but since it included elimination of the National Mediation Board's ruling and reduces spending for the EAS, the bill was being blocked in the Senate.
Democrats had criticized House Republicans for passing a short term extension with amendments that would have difficulty passing the Senate. On Wednesday, Reid sent a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) asking him to pass a short term extension without “extraneous amendments.”
Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), who added the EAS spending cuts to the short term extension, blamed Democrats for the impasse, saying in a statement, “the House of Representatives successfully passed the FAA extension bill the week of July 22nd and submitted it to the Senate for its approval, just as it has done numerous times before without incident. I am disappointed that Democrats in the Senate have chosen to burden taxpayers with further wasteful spending on the backs of faultless FAA employees and look forward to an expedited resolution to this matter.”
Transportation Secretary LaHood, a former Republican member of the House appointed by Obama in 2009, tried shameing members of Congress into action in an interview with CNN.
“The idea that they have left town on their vacations and they are receiving a paycheck and they talk a lot about jobs. They give good speeches about it. I want them to walk the walk. Come back to D.C. If they want to talk the talk, then walk the walk, and let’s put our friends and neighbors back to work,” LaHood said.
In the agreement announced today by Reid, the Senate will pass the short-term extension approved by the House with the EAS funding cuts, but LaHood can use his authority to grant waivers to airports effected by the cuts. The overruling of the National Mediation Board's decision will also become law.
The temporary funding measure will only last until mid-September, so Congress will have to revisit these issues when it returns from its August recess.
