Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.
“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”
Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
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shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.
Ah, so there was a shutdown in 2019 as well. Anyone know if there was anything in common between 2019 and 2025? In, idk the American government or something? Any important people in common between 2019 and 2025?
How dare you ask people to do some basic critical thinking!
I actually think this is a risky play for the ruling class because the average USian rarely flies. It is the wealthy management class of the US that utilizes airline travel extensively, and their jobs are useless and in large part unnecessary.
What happens when the business shell game of moving naive idiots with expensive watches around on jets to give the appearance of important business happening is shattered when the people who do actual work in this country keep showing up and getting real work done while the management class is utterly grounded from flights being cancelled en masse?
If I was part of the ruling class this would be making me VERY worried.
No, the country is on fire sale. They’re loading up to head to greener pastures. Destroying US flight means that an alternative they’ve invested in can rise. Just wait until ATC globally is done in Chinese instead, then it’ll make sense.
Get out now, the government is never reopening and this will be our new future.
This is the small government the GOP base wanted.
Kinda hope THIS government never reopens but I’m not going to leave, I want to help establish the “something better” that’s going to come after this shit is gone.
what a terrible country
No government: good for the people oppressed by the State
No planes: good for the climate.
Unfortunately, the “people” benefiting most from less state “oppression” are corporations.
The rest of the people are still being plenty oppressed e.g. by masked goons claiming to work for the government. Shutdown or no shutdown.
Meanwhile, the government is literally letting people starve for political reasons.
As for the planes, I agree.
Yes, it seems that we’re focusing on the wrong thing here
The narrative shouldn’t be parties diagreeing on policy (to get the gov up again). The narrative should be on why the fuck we’re letting ICE and the executive continue to operate during a shutdown, and how we’re going to force them to cease and desist
no government means no one’s being paid to stop assholes who need enforced laws to keep them from fucking over humanity. Look at how bad it is now *with government and laws *
No government means we do it ourselves.
I can’t really think of a country more reliant on air travel than the US. They should all just stop turning up for work.
I don’t see why you would do that job if know you’re going to frequently go for weeks / months without pay once every year or two, you’re constantly understaffed, and you’re working like this in 2025…
Just replace them with AI, that should go well /s
Pretty sure this is the plan though, privatize and sell it to Trump’s buddies. Wouldn’t be surprised if Palantir or Oracle had a product in development.
In may Duffy announced equipment overhauls, they could have tapped a company around then too
Yeah that was my guess
I mean, it probably wouldn’t be worse…
I hope we can all agree that people should not be furloughed or working without pay during this shutdown but something I haven’t seen reported on is the effect this will have on economies locally and nationally.
Napkin math so someone correct me if needed:
- 4.5 million furloughed or working without pay.
- Average salary I found was $68,000 but let’s use 50,000 to account for the top paying jobs probably still getting paid.
- That gives us $4,166 monthly.
- For each month of shutdown that comes to $18,747,000,000 that isn’t being spent
While I’m sure most of us Americans could do with less consumption, I can’t help but wonder how many small businesses are going to suffer from this. This is especially true for areas with large amounts of federal employment.
Small businesses were already disproportionately suffering from the capricious tariff situation. And areas with large federal employment specifically were already suffering from the Doge chainsaw layoffs. This administration is just piling it on.
Good points, thank you for adding to the picture.
There are actually projections for the economic downturn to come that do and don’t factor in the government shutdown reaching thanksgiving, then Christmas. So it is being considered in terms of consumer spending as a whole, but you mentioned small businesses specifically, and they are the ones that will be hurt more than anyone in what’s to come. Although, I’m seeing more and more local-only-economies pop up, where you all try to keep money within the network of the community.
The projections I saw were for the economy to level off by 1Q 2026, but if the shutdown reaches Christmas, it’ll actually shrink an entire point.
Democrats proposed a bill that all Federal employees get paid during the shutdown. GOP said no.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who introduced a bill to pay both federal workers required to work during the shutdown and those who are furloughed. This proposal was supported by several unions representing federal workers but was ultimately blocked by Senate Democrats. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/07/politics/shutdown-congress-federal-pay-vote
So I’m confused. Was this another bill?
E: https://lemmy.world/comment/20388431 helped clear that up a bit. Thanks friend.
The first time I’m reading about this. If the situation were reversed Republicans would be on every show everywhere repeating this taking point.
Democrats need to fucking hammer the Republicans on this 24/7 on every outlet possible.
Are there news media not owned by the far right?
If so the Democrats could act like it by showing what happens when they try to say what they aren’t allowed to say.
At which point you could say that the Democrats are owned by the far right, at which point “far right” becomes an impractical phrase to use to distinguish between the likes of AOC and Mamdani and the likes of Trump.
So no, the news media aren’t owned by the far right. They are owned by the same people that own the Democrats and Republicans, which have a diverse range of right wing opinions none of which include stopping fascists that got elected through the system that they rely on for their wealth and power.
If the DNC wanted to hammer the Republicans on this, then by the same token the news media would want to let them. But the DNC doesn’t want to encourage opposition too much because they know they and their owners would lose massive amounts of money if there was any kind of structural reform.
“Best we can do is fund spoiler candidates after our boy lost the NYC democratic primary”
They should propose a bill that makes a lapse in appropriations trigger a CR so there’s no need for a shutdown.
Leadership believes they would be unable to cobble together enough votes to pass a budget if there wasn’t the threat of a shutdown to hang over the Representatives.
Voters in the US tend to elect Representatives who are unwilling to compromise. Being obstructionist is rewarded with way better re-election chances than getting anything done. Voters want to see their candidate Stand Up To The Enemy, although they will accept passage of a Perfect Bill (as annointed by their media of choice). Passing a bill that is later deemed by their media of choice to have any small non-perfection gets them primaried and booted. So any candidate that doesn’t have extensive cover for passing a budget, that by its nature has to be a compromise, is replaced by a more obstructionist person.
What is CR in this context?
Continuing resolution. Basically if they can’t make a new budget the old one gets used.
… kinda like every other sensible nation ON EARTH. Sigh.
Not really.
In Canada and other parliamentary type systems, failing to pass a budget triggers an election.
God, that sounds so nice. If you play these stupid games then you instantly end up on the chopping block. That fixes so many issues.
To be fair, our FPTP system does tend to create majority governments so this wouldn’t ever be an issue then as they can pass anything they want. We might be having an election though if this current minority government budget fails which it might.
It’d be nice if we could move to proportional representation though as majority governments are almost always with well less than 50% of the vote and vote splitting fucks things up for center/ledt parties and let’s the conservatives win more because they consolidated into 1 party including all the extreme right whackjobs
Good point. That definitely disrupts things to some extent – but the government doesn’t literally stop everything, AFAIK. Don’t departments still get their funding throughout, until the new government passes another budget?
No, you are right, things don’t just stop when that happens. I imagine funding could lapse if it was about to lapse, but just because there isn’t a budget passed yet doesn’t mean its immediately going to lapse.
If we somehow had a budget fail, and for some reason took 6 months to have an election (would never happen), we might run into funding issues?
Didn’t have that until a decade or so back? Thought I remembered we switched to this system so Republicans could reevaluate each time/hold everything hostage…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States#Overview
Shutdowns have occurred since 1980 when the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that government operations need to cease in a lapse of appropriations to prevent violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. I believe the opinion was rendered during the Carter Administration.
Ah, thanks for the correction!
Hey, no worries. That’s how we all grow. I’m wrong all the fucking time.
Kinda weird that’s not already the default behavior.
Not really. You’re coming at it assuming the point of the system is to benefit the majority of the people. It is not., and the people who do benefit have a vested interest in ensuring things do not change.
And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.
As with most dishes, a sauce would be wonderrful
The bill is called “The true shutdown fairness act”, and it is a poorly named response to the republican “shutdown fairness act”.
The main differences between the bills (which aren’t really covered in the news, but you can read the bills) is that the shutdown fairness act was limited to excepted employees (those who have to work without pay), as well as some military personnel and some contractors. But it gave trump discretion about who could get paid, and did nothing for furloughed employees, nor guarantee all service members or contractors get paid (again, because it allowed trump to pick and choose)
The true shutdown fairness act aimed to ensure all federal employees and service members get paid, and prevent mass firings during the shutdown. I don’t know/understand why this bill was rejected (I’ll edit if I can find anything)
This post and this post go into a bit more detail.
Edit: I can’t find a news article with direct quotes, but this is part of the ai overview (so take it with a grain of salt)
Underlying reasons: Democrats opposed the Republican bill because they felt it would grant the President too much power to decide which employees would be paid and which would not. Republicans, in turn, blocked the Democratic bill, with Johnson expressing concern that it would limit the President’s ability to manage the government and potentially reduce the workforce.
“dallas approach this is united airlines 122 request landing”
air…
“dallas approach?”
“This is dallas eliza, how does landing make you feel?”
"Excellent question! This isn’t just air traffic control. This is air traffic controlGPT. Here’s how to bring in your plane for a safe and effective landing:
- The first step—and this is critical—is to check for a runway. Without a runway, your landing may be bumpier than usual.
- …"
A plane is gonna crash because of overworked atc and then they’ll declare it terrorism and invoke martial law.
Mark my words.
We all know the real reason is DEI! /s
If I see a black air traffic controller I am gonna be like “Boy, I hope he is qualified.”
Which is exactly what Jesus would have been like.
was that stephen miller?
Nope it was that dead asshole Charlie Kirk
Bah, they will just blame democrates…
Is that Socrates brother
Hippocrates perhaps
Just empty crates.
At least I’m guessing those unpaid federal workers won’t vote republican for the rest of their lives
🤣 Sweet summer child
They still will
Did you see what happened in Virginia, where a whole bunch of federal workers and contractors live?
I don’t know what you’re referring to but in looking for whatever it is, I stumbled on this which seems to support my original statement quite strongly.
inb4 he says “what’s the usecase for air traffic controllers anyway? just land wherever you see a free runaway”
