Republicans late Monday blocked a bipartisan Senate plan to end the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration, making it increasingly likely Congress will be unable to resolve the legislative standoff before September.
Having resolved the federal debt crisis, Congress is expected to leave at the end of the week for its August recess. If that happens, lost revenue from uncollected airline ticket taxes could exceed $1.2 billion before lawmakers return to work a month later, senators said.
The Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House are at odds over proposals to cut rural air service subsidies and to change a federal labor rule to make it more difficult for airline workers to unionize. Unable to resolve their differences, the FAA’s operating authority was allowed to expire at midnight on July 22.
The showdown began last month when the House passed a GOP bill to extend the FAA’s operating authority that cut air service subsidies by $16.5 million. Democrats said the House was trying to impose policies that hadn’t been negotiated with Senate and using the subsidies as leverage to force them to make a deal on the labor issue. The labor provision is in a separate, long-term FAA funding bill.
On Monday, Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia Democrat, chairman of the committee that oversees the FAA, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the senior Republican on the committee, floated a proposal to restore full operating authority to the FAA while cutting air service subsidies $71 million. The plan fell apart when Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he would use parliamentary procedures to tie up the Senate in an effort to prevent a vote on the measure.
Mrs. Hutchison questioned the logic of allowing a stalemate over relatively small savings in subsidy cuts to prevent the government from collecting many times that amount in revenues designated for the operation of the nation’s air traffic system.
“This just does not make sense,” she said.
The subsidies program was created after airlines were deregulated in 1978 to ensure continued air service on less-profitable routes to remote communities. The program has grown to provide service to about 150 communities, from Muscle Shoals, Ala., to Pelican, Alaska, and costs about $200 million a year. Critics say the subsides are too high and some of the communities are within a reasonable drive from a hub airport.
Mr. Coburn told reporters earlier in the day he would block any bill to end the shutdown that doesn’t eliminate air service subsidies for communities that are within 90 miles of a hub airport. The Rockefeller-Hutchison plan used a different formula for deciding which communities would be eliminated from the program.
The Rockefeller plan would spare subsidies for Morgantown, W.Va.; the GOP plan would eliminate them.
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