Josh Barro, Columnist

Obama Administration Is Right to Hold Fliers Hostage

The Obama administration is holding delayed fliers hostage as it seeks a broader fix for sequestration. Good.

April 24, 2013 at 9:17 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post's editorial pages are on the case of the Federal Aviation Administration's apparent mishandling of the budget sequestration. Why hasn't the FAA been more flexible about how it cuts its budget? Why did it decide to uniformly furlough 10 percent of air-traffic controllers, even at the country's busiest air-traffic centers, causing travel delays all around the country?

The Journal and the Post both have good points about how this could be handled better. The FAA's protest that it must not "pick winners and losers" among its own facilities by prioritizing the busiest ones is lame; that's exactly what an agency is supposed to do when it cuts its budget. The Post is right to note that equal across-the-board furloughs put the interests of the air-traffic controllers' union above those of the public. And though the Obama administration disputes that it has the direct legal authority to avoid the delays, it could surely have a standalone legislative fix for air-traffic control, along the lines the Post proposes, if it wanted one.