Air Safety Already Had Gaps. Then the Shutdown Came.

During the recent government shutdown—which lasted a staggering 43 days, from October 1 to November 12—the national conversation about flying safety focused solely on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration screeners. Few lawmakers and reporters even seemed aware that thousands of other federal watchdogs spent six weeks on their couches.

These are the FAA safety inspectors, part of the Flight Standards division overseeing 19,482 airports, airlines, civil aviation, aircraft manufacturers, repair stations, private space, helicopters, blimps, balloons, drones, and the licensing of pilots, mechanics, controllers, dispatchers, and instructors, and engaging in certification, inspection, surveillance, investigation, and enforcement. You would think that the men and women responsible for the safety of millions of travelers daily would be seen as essential employees, even during a shutdown. But according to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) union, about 2,400 of the 3,800 Flight Standards employees it represents were initially furloughed.

Understaffing, underfunding, and underequipping the FAA is a bipartisan affair dating back to Ronald Reagan breaking the PATCO strike in 1981.

As an FAA inspector explains, “Passengers interact with TSA screeners. And the media covers [air traffic] controllers. But they never see inspectors behind the scenes. So we’re not a priority for Washington.”

During the shutdown, airlines and aviation companies like Boeing policed themselves. Even when safety inspectors return to work, they cannot account for details missed when they were off the job, or keep up with the backlog of work accumulated in that time. That creates potential ongoing hazards in the system.

“Everyone at FAA is essential, including clerks who pull up the latest weather and flight clearances,” says Capt. Rusty Aimer, a retired United Airlines pilot and a training pilot for Boeing who is now CEO of Aero Consulting Experts. As for furloughing FAA inspectors, Aimer adds, “Human beings cannot police themselves. They definitely left the fox in charge of the henhouse for six weeks.”

New Normal: Broken

Although President Trump has set new lows in mistreating federal watchdogs, the truth is that understaffing, underfunding, and underequipping the FAA is a bipartisan affair dating back to Ronald Reagan breaking the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981 and permanently firing 11,345 controllers. If it’s about blame, there’s enough ammunition to attack all seven presidents and countless congressional leaders from both parties who’ve failed to secure adequate FAA funding for 45 years.

As everyone learned last year, air traffic control (ATC) is understaffed and outdated, leading to alarming close calls, 3,000 staff vacancies before the shutdown, and equipment dating to the disco era. Newark Liberty International Airport, the poster child for ATC shitshows, suffered thousands of weekly flight disruptions in 2025.

But FAA safety staffing also has failed to keep pace with airline growth. In 2005, 739 million passengers “enplaned” on U.S. flights; that number rose to 983 million in 2024, a 33 percent increase. But in 2005, the FAA had 3,400 inspectors, so to keep pace should have meant 4,533 by 2024. Instead, there actually were 4,172, a shortage of 361 inspectors.

“The whole FAA is just as short-staffed as ATC,” says Philip Mann, a 17-year FAA veteran currently teaching at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

A 2021 report by the Department of Transportation’s inspector general found “FAA does not make full use of [its staffing] model’s functions and relevant data to project current and future inspector staffing levels.” It also found that 79 percent of managers nationwide claimed to be short-staffed.

Simply put, the FAA is in a constant state of chaos and crisis. Shutdowns make it even worse. And Washington’s response? Send everybody home.

Just Who Is Essential?

So just who are the “essential employees” we hear about during every shutdown? In fact, it’s not just safety inspectors, but thousands of FAA employees contributing in multitudinous ways, including maintaining airport navigational equipment, completing capital projects, and continuing training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City.

Mann suggests that conceptually, such language must reflect those FAA employees with authority to affect one or more operations, meaning separating “the critical tasks from the noncritical tasks.”

John Goglia, the only FAA-licensed aircraft mechanic to serve as a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member and a recent inductee into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, concurs that some 6,000 FAA Flight Standards employees are overlooked: “I agree we’re treating the operations side with less attention than the ATC side.”

In November, Republican and Democratic leaders at the House Transportation Committee and Aviation Subcommittee introduced the Aviation Funding Solvency Act, which would ensure continuous pay for those “managing the airspace.” Obviously, paying controllers is both critical and just, since they famously worked long hours without pay during the shutdown. But the press release emphasized ATC, mentioning controllers 11 times. So the vagueness of “controllers and other aviation safety personnel” worries some experts. As one airline mechanic says, “If you also mean inspectors, then say that.”

More than 37 airlines and aviation stakeholders offered support, with several claiming the legislation would protect inspectors. But the bill itself states that if funding is insufficient, then the FAA “shall prioritize continuing the payment of compensation for employees of the Air Traffic Organization.” PASS National President Dave Spero tells the Prospect, “If the bill were to pass, it would compensate all FAA employees.” He acknowledges that if allocated money runs out, the FAA would determine that only air traffic employees would get paid, but he asserts, “We don’t believe Congress would allow that to happen.”

That puts a lot of faith in a broken system.

The Price of Dysfunction

The Prospect obtained internal FAA shutdown documents from 2023 through 2025, and they speak to the dysfunction heaped upon frontline employees. A September 2025 Transportation Department report estimated that 11,322 FAA employees would be furloughed. Another January 2024 memo entitled “Furlough Process” states: “[Flight Safety] staffing strategy is to begin any shutdown as if it were a long weekend, so that direct surveillance is not typically required.” An October 2024 copy of an agreement between the FAA and PASS states furloughed employees may not use government-funded equipment (laptops, tablets, cellphones) to perform work, even from home.

A veteran FAA safety inspector at one of the nation’s busiest Flight Standards District Offices (known as FSDOs, or “fizz-does”) raises an under-addressed issue: It’s not just shutdowns, but false alarms. “It’s really, really frustrating,” he explains. “For every shutdown, there were 12 close calls. And this happens over and over due to these ridiculous continuing resolutions. You just don’t know if you’re going to be back at work on Monday morning so you have to spend time preparing for it even when it doesn’t happen.”

He explains there’s a domino effect, even after inspectors return: “Surveillance work is quarterly, so you may have had eight things to do, including training, inspections, pilot check rides, etc. I’ve got 90 days of work backlogged and I’m missing opportunities, with more work coming in.”

Not surprisingly, for taxpayers FAA shutdowns are quite expensive. They lead to ATC slowdowns, mandatory recurrent training for FAA staff after absences, and accrued “use or lose” vacation time creating further staffing shortages. Mann also explains that finalizing FAA contracts requires thousands of labor hours: “That’s an awful lot of time and a lot of extra cost. There is a huge net cost to shutdowns and that cost can be way higher than people think.”

Anger from aviation experts is palpable. “The shutdown was risk-taking and a betrayal of the public’s trust,” says John King, a former airline whistleblower turned accident statistician. “Safety inspectors are on the front lines to monitor and document safety violations to protect the flying public. There is no one else.”

Work Not Done

As someone who personally investigated numerous fatal airline accidents, NTSB’s Goglia knows how valuable it is for both the FAA (a Department of Transportation subsidiary) and the independent NTSB to immediately initiate crash investigations. But during the shutdown, the NTSB tweeted it would “only carry out emergency-essential work” in a year with multiple high-profile aviation accidents.

“Data and information are perishable items and if you’re not out there collecting it in real time then it gets lost. It’s stale bread,” said Goglia. While there were no fatal accidents during the shutdown, King’s research indicates only 50 percent of mandatory Service Difficulty Reporting System documents have been filed in recent years.

Merle Meyers was a 31-year Boeing manager who was forced out and became a whistleblower. Due to FAA staffing shortages, Boeing employees have been deputized to act as FAA inspectors under the “designee” system. And even when appropriations are in place, factory employees “rarely” see FAA inspectors. “Boeing management will go behind the FAA, or the FAA will look the other way. It’s a Monty Python skit,” Meyers says.

But Meyers believes the shutdown made an unacceptable situation even worse. “My concern is more bad behavior—without the presence of FAA it really becomes a Lord of the Flies scenario,” he says. Meyers points to 2024’s infamous Alaska Airlines door plug blowout and explains, “It’s critical that problems are caught during production.” He also suggests a chronic problem at Boeing—the comingling of approved and unapproved aircraft parts on planes being delivered to airlines—“bypasses quality” and is more dangerous without an FAA presence.

“I’m sure airlines were thrilled the FAA wasn’t around for six weeks,” says aviation attorney Loretta Alkalay, a former FAA regional counsel who currently teaches at Vaughn College of Aeronautics. She represents a critical subset of FAA employees virtually forgotten during shutdowns: in-house lawyers.

Alkalay calls it “frustrating” that so many FAA staffers aren’t recognized for their critical input: “There really is no position at FAA not related to safety. They work in the background, all those people that keep the system going.” In her case, it’s FAA lawyers overseeing disciplinary actions, rule changes, contracts, and more.

The FAA’s threats of enforcements, monetary penalties, shutdowns, and/or criminal prosecutions are made viable by its counsel. As Alkalay notes, “Inspectors can only do so much, like a five-day grounding order. FAA lawyers are the only ones who can shut down an airline or revoke a pilot’s license.”

It isn’t unreasonable to worry that aviation companies push limits during a shutdown; as I noted in my book Attention All Passengers, far too many corporations openly flout FAA regulations. In the battle between safety and profit, Alkalay sums it up: “There’s so much pressure for airlines to violate rules because it’s expensive to comply with them.”

Two weeks after the shutdown, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency directive ordering the grounding of about 6,000 Airbus models at 375 airlines worldwide. This concerned a serious flight control issue after a JetBlue A320 flying from Cancun to Newark suddenly dropped 100 feet in several seconds, prompting an emergency diversion and hospitalizing 15 to 20 passengers. The FAA oversaw groundings at six U.S. airlines. But how smoothly would this have played out weeks earlier, when the FAA workforce was at home?

“In theory, nothing should happen during a shutdown,” Goglia says. “But in the real world, I’m sure things happened. So we may never know.”

Unseen Effects

Shutdown blowback remains hard to estimate. Low morale is a constant at the FAA; in 2019, controllers sued the government over unpaid overtime after the previous shutdown. Incredibly, one controller recently told NPR he had just received a $400 payment from that shutdown—in September 2025, nearly seven years later.

And then there’s the brain drain from mass resignations. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy himself acknowledged: “I used to have about four controllers retire a day before the shutdown. I’m now up to 15 to 20 a day.” As Mann notes, “We don’t know what knowledge we lost from people who left.”

Despite compelling evidence of decades-long erosion, Duffy and countless others in government still claim America has the “safest airspace in the world.” But shutdowns only highlight this as false.

It’s worth noting that a 35-day government shutdown seven years ago fell smack between the two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people, first in October 2018 and then in March 2019. The FAA’s investigation of Boeing’s fatal MCAS flight control software was delayed, and while some experts doubt it would have prevented the second accident, the hiatus still raised disturbing questions. The Wall Street Journal noted: “U.S. officials have said the federal government’s recent shutdown also halted work on the fix for five weeks.”

Which raises the question: Should we worry that this latest shutdown will contribute to tragedies yet to unfold? Capt. Aimer is blunt: “We won’t know until the next crash. The damage could be felt for a long, long time to come.”

The post Air Safety Already Had Gaps. Then the Shutdown Came. appeared first on The American Prospect.