If Democrats Don’t Champion the Civil Service, Who Will?
Understaffing is the result of successful efforts to defund and demonize the federal workers whose job it is to keep planes from crashing into each other. Since President Ronald Reagan broke an air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 by replacing thousands of striking workers, the agency has suffered waves of staff reductions as controllers retire and it fails to recruit and train enough people to replace them. Even before the pandemic triggered more shortages, the workforce was at a 30-year low.
Safety challenges arise in the wake of “inadequate, inconsistent funding,” according to a 2023 report from the National Airspace System Safety Review Team. The agency was hit by the sequestration cuts sought by Republicans and enacted in 2013, which led to furloughs for air traffic controllers, as well as government shutdowns orchestrated by Republicans in 2013 and 2018, all of which forced the agency to halt hiring and training for over a year in total. Congress kept the FAA’s funding essentially flat between 2018 and 2023, and extra money offered during the pandemic went mostly to infrastructure, not safety roles. “At current funding levels,” the authors of the 2023 report warned, “the FAA has insufficient resources to carry out its portfolio of responsibilities.”
Insufficient funding leads to catastrophes like the American Airlines crash. It is just one of the outcomes of defunding, deleting, and destroying the government. The tragedy offers a visceral and concrete example that Democrats can and must use to demonstrate how much we all rely on a functioning federal bureaucracy. It has made visible the behind the scenes work the government does and what happens when lawmakers refuse to devote enough resources to carry it out. It offers the best chance lawmakers have to offer an affirmative vision of government to the American people, one that stands between Americans and fraud, hunger, injury, illness, and, ultimately, death.
