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.
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.
My people. I love being wrong, someone always corrects me, and then I learn something.