The Wall Street Journal on Why Obama’s FAA Sequester Cuts Are a Sham

People are beginning to notice the Obama administration’s cynical strategy to inflict the most damaging cuts possible under his sequester. The facts are starting to come out, and as the Wall Street Journal notes, “the story gets worse the closer we look.”

Via the WSJ:

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in “Flight Delays as Political Strategy,” but the story gets worse the closer we look.

Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA’s budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can’t deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

Ponder this logic, if that’s the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won’t arrive on time.

The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travellers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama’s “passenger bill of rights,” the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. But sauce for the goose is apparently an open bar for the FAA gander.

They sum it all up:

It is actively creating even more delays, cancellations and missed connections in order to incite a public outcry on behalf of bigger government.

The President’s strategy is clear: use his sequester’s painful cuts to scare Americans into thinking cutting spending is bad. Unfortunately for the President, that requires convincing Americans that there is no waste whatsoever in the federal government that could be cut instead.

We have a list of billions in egregious examples of wasteful spending Obama has decided to protect while forcing travelers to feel the pain.

Stand up to Obama’s unnecessary cuts to air travel services. Sign our petition here to tell Obama: “Your flight is not more important than mine.”