A group of protesters gathered at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Thursday had a message for Congress: Keep your politics off our planes.
The protest, organized by Americans for Prosperity, consisted of roughly 30 people expressing their disapproval over the recent Federal Aviation Administration furloughs that are causing flight delays — furloughs AFP says could be designed to make the sequester hurt as much as possible.
“The President needs to be accountable for this,” said Dave Schwartz, Virginia state director of AFP. “He’s the problem. He’s the issue.”
Schwartz said much of the messaging coming from the White House was “nonsense.” He added that the flight delays were either the result of “a manufactured crisis” and making sequester cuts hurt as much as possible or “gross mismanagement of money.”
As The Washington Examiner reported, the FAA received a $16.668 billion budget for 2013, an amount larger than the $15.172 billion President Obama originally requested for the agency. Post-sequester, the FAA still had a budget of $15.999 billion.
FAA regional employees have also revealed in emails that “the FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is,” as The Wall Street Journal reported.
AFP had been reaching out to airports across the country to organize protests, but as of Wednesday, only DCA had allowed the group to demonstrate. As per DCA guidelines for demonstrations, the protest group was prohibited from amplifying their voices and no sticks were allowed on the signs. AFP was also instructed to limit the protest to 25 people.
While most of the protesters were AFP staffers, Freddie Walker of Falls Church, Va., said he heard about the protest via email and showed up to fight government mismanagement of funds — even though he doesn’t travel and the flight delays won’t affect him directly.
“If I were a small businessman or the CEO of a major company and my revenue took a slight dip — if I couldn’t manage that without taking away from the customer service, I don’t think I’d be in that job long,” Walker said. “That’s what I would like to see now — people who can’t do those jobs will be out of their jobs.”
Beyond the obvious inconvenience to travelers, Schwartz also said the flight delays could also hurt the economy if small business owners and salespeople are forced to change their schedules or fly less because of the delays.
“That’s going to hurt business, it’s going to hurt the economy and that means people are going to get laid off and the unemployment rate is going to go up,” he said. “And that’s what we’re really, really concerned about.”
