Federal Aviation Administration

Floor Speech

Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator from Minnesota being willing to stay in the chair for a few more minutes before I have to preside so I can take this time to express my concern about what has happened with the failure to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration.

The authorization for that administration has expired, and it has led to a partial shutdown of that agency and to 4,000 workers being placed on unpaid furlough. A number of those workers are from New Hampshire. While I know all of us here are glad we were able to come together to reach a bipartisan agreement on raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a financial crisis, I am deeply disappointed that bipartisanship has failed us when it comes to reauthorizing the FAA.

I understand the House may head home for recess today and for the rest of August, stranding 4,000 FAA workers and as many as 70,000--that is right, 70,000--airport construction workers around the country who are out of work until we can get an agreement. So let me review for a minute how we got here.

Since the FAA's authorization expired in 2007, Congress has passed 20 short-term extensions of the FAA. All of those bills, every single one of them, were clean bills intended to keep the FAA running while Congress decided how to deal with the complicated policy issues of a long-term reauthorization. Unfortunately, the 21st time around--that is the time that we are in--the House decided it was no longer important to keep the FAA operating, and 4,000 people are out of work while the House of Representatives may head home for recess.

I appreciate that there are some significant differences between the two long-term FAA authorization bills passed by the House and the Senate, the most controversial of which centered around the ruling by the National Mediation Board on unionization rules. But that is why Chairman Rockefeller and Ranking Member Hutchison appointed Members to a conference committee where the House and Senate could work out our policy differences. So far, the House has refused to appoint conferees. Instead, they have decided to stop negotiating and, unfortunately, to play politics with 4,000 FAA workers and their families.

Right now the FAA has been shut down for 11 days and as long as that shutdown continues, the government will continue to lose $200 million a week, about $30 million a day, that would pay for airport maintenance and safety and for the replacement of our country's outdated air traffic control system. If the shutdown continues through the August recess, we are going to lose over $1 billion in revenue that could be used to upgrade our air transportation system. That is waste of the worst kind, and it makes our deficit problems worse at a time when everybody says they are so focused on the deficits.

Every day the shutdown continues has a very real, very painful impact on people all around the country who have been furloughed. I hope the House, in leaving for recess, has left open the opportunity to continue to address this dispute and resolve it in a way that will bring everybody back to work.

The FAA has issued stop-work orders for 241 airport construction projects worth nearly $11 billion that support 70,000 jobs. Again, these are real people who are being forced to make real sacrifices.

In my State of New Hampshire, a $16 million project to rebuild the runway of Boire Field in Nashua will be delayed if we don't pass an extension. Boire Field is the busiest general aviation airport in New England, and breaking ground this fall on the runway reconstruction project would have created 50 jobs. Instead, because of this delay, construction likely won't begin until spring and those 50 people are going to have to wait, something that shouldn't have to happen. The tragedy is they won't have jobs, not because they don't have the skills or that the project isn't needed but because the House is playing politics with the FAA. Forty-two employees at the FAA's air traffic control center in Nashua have been furloughed and this shutdown is taking a terrible toll on them. I want to tell you about one, Steve Finnerty from Bedford.

I talked to Steve earlier today. He is a civil engineer and he has worked for the FAA for the last 15 years. He is the sole breadwinner for his family of five. He has a young daughter and a pair of 1-year-old twins who are struggling with medical issues. He has already lost nearly 2 weeks of pay, and he is not sure that he is going to get that pay back even when he does go back to work. He is concerned, understandably, about how he is going to pay his mortgage and his doctor bills and the grocery bills and all the other needs his family has. Now he is facing the possibility of an entire month without pay.

There are thousands of people all across the country who are stuck in the same circumstance who want to get back to work, who we need to get back to work. We need them to get back to work so they can pay their mortgages and their children's college tuitions and their medical bills. We need them to get back to work so they can continue to build a GPS-based air traffic control system like every other industrialized country has. We need to get this economy moving again. That means we need to be serious about our responsibilities here in Washington. Let's pass a clean extension of the FAA. Let's get these people back to work, and let's go about the business of rebuilding a modern air traffic control system like we should have in the United States.

I yield the floor, and I would suggest the absence of a quorum.

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