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Americans are waking up to a dangerous truth this week: tens of thousands of essential federal workers, including air traffic controllers, are being forced to keep our skies safe while going unpaid because Washington couldn’t get its act together. These are skilled, professional patriots who already do one of the toughest jobs in the country, and now they’re being used as political pawns while flights pile up and families scramble to get where they need to go.
Travelers felt the pain immediately as major hubs from Newark to Denver and even busy regional towers like Hollywood Burbank saw staffing holes and long delays, with reports of some towers briefly unstaffed and sick calls ticking up across the system. The FAA’s staffing squeeze — coming atop a long-running shortage of controllers — turned routine travel into chaos for millions and pushed some regions to reduce staffing by nearly half. Families and businesses aren’t collateral damage; they’re the pressure point that will force politicians to stop playing games.
Let’s be clear about the system Congress has trapped us in: certified controllers are legally “excepted” employees required to work through a shutdown, often under mandatory overtime and now without a paycheck, while vital training and support staff are furloughed. The union and aviation leaders warn that pausing the training pipeline and furloughing thousands of support employees will deepen the shortage and delay modernization efforts our aviation system desperately needs. That’s the predictable, avoidable wreckage of a shutdown driven by political theater rather than governance.
Who’s responsibility? The Senate failed to pass stopgap funding measures before the fiscal year began on October 1, and both sides dug in over policy fights — notably a partisan standoff over health care subsidies that left no path to reopening the government. Republicans pushed short-term funding proposals while Democrats demanded changes that derailed compromise, and now hardworking controllers are paying the price for that impasse. Congress had options to prevent this; instead it chose brinksmanship.
Conservatives should not shrink from calling out the cynicism on display: when elected leaders make political demands that force essential workers to labor unpaid, they’ve abandoned their duty to the American people. History shows a small number of controllers calling in sick can create enormous pressure to end a shutdown — and that reality is finally cutting through the spin in Washington. The public will not tolerate a situation where safety and convenience are sacrificed for political leverage.
So here’s what must happen: Congress should pass immediate, clean funding to restore pay and fully staff our air traffic system, then take the painful policy fights back to committees and chambers where the American people can actually win. Conservatives must demand that our leaders put pilots, passengers, and controllers ahead of partisan theater and that anyone who weaponizes federal employees be held to account.
We owe these brave men and women more than platitudes — we owe them action. Pay the controllers, reopen the government, and stop letting Washington’s games jeopardize the safety and prosperity of hardworking Americans.
