Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has demanded the bill is passed to end the Federal Aviation Administration closed. At a White House briefing yesterday, LaHood said: “Congress needs to pass a clean bill so our 4,000 FAA employees who are without a paycheck since last Saturday can come back to work.”
“For all of my friends on Capitol Hill who give speeches every day about jobs, the importance of jobs, putting people to work, this is not the time to be laying off 70,000 construction workers.”
LaHood believes the sticking issues relating to unresolved labor and air services can be resolved over the next 30 days. He exerted Congress not to “hold hostage common, ordinary citizens who want to work, who want to do construction jobs, who make their living doing that, and our FAA employees”.
LaHood also said it was not fair for airlines to continue to charge customers a federal tax on tickets and then keeping the money for themselves. A fact he said he had made known to them. “They’re collecting this money and it’s going to their bottom line. And I think that is not right, and I simply think it’s not fair for them to do that… And I’ve made that known to them,” he said. “I think the airlines should not be collecting this amount of money under the umbrella that it’s a tax. It’s not. They shouldn’t be collecting it. And they shouldn’t be adding it on to passengers’ price of a ticket.”
He added he was working on a way to refund passengers. The closure of the FAA is costing the Treasury $200 million a week in lost airline tax revenue, at a time it can ill afford to be losing money.