The bill aims to alleviate the pains felt in air traffic control towers and terminals alike. FAA furloughs began in full force this week, and left many airports with delays due to reduced staffing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just had a really big win here in Washington for travelers all across our country,\u201d Udall, D-Colo., told reporters Thursday night after the bill\u2019s passage.<\/p>\n
The Reducing Flight Delays Act, introduced earlier on Thursday, grants the secretary of transportation the flexibility to move as much as $253 million from other parts of the department\u2019s budget to the Federal Aviation Administration, according to the New York Times. It also includes congressional oversight through the Senate and House Appropriations committees.<\/p>\n
The furloughs come from the budget cuts known as the sequester, which are mandatory cuts that will slash $85 billion from the federal budget this fiscal year alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just can\u2019t let these blunt cuts cripple travel,\u201d Udall said, calling the air travel issues and flight delays a drag on the resurging economy.<\/p>\n
Udall and his co-sponsor Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, introduced legislation in early March to give federal agencies and departments more flexibility in implementing the sequester cuts, the Herald previously reported.<\/p>\n
That bill could have avoided problems such as these aviation delays, Udall said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
bill aims to alleviate the pains felt in air traffic control towers and terminals alike. FAA furloughs began in full force this week, and left many airports with delays due to reduced staffing. \u201cWe just had a really big win here in Washington for travelers all across our country,\u201d Udall, D-Colo., told reporters Thursday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[11,13,1126],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-54602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-economy-general","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-politics-general"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55138,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602\/revisions\/55138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54602"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=54602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}