Thursday was “one of the best days” U.S. airspace has had in a while, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday.
“Yesterday was one of the best days our airspace had in a while with just a few air traffic controllers calling out from work,” Duffy revealed.
“We’re reviewing the data provided and are working hard to return the airspace back to normal. You can thank the six House Democrats for opening up the government!” he added.
His update follows President Donald Trump signing a bill on Wednesday formally reopening the government after the Democrats’ 43-day shutdown.
“For the past 43 days, Democrats in Congress shut down the government of the United States in an attempt to extort American taxpayers for hundreds of billions of dollars for illegal aliens and people that came into our country illegally,” Trump said at the time.
“Today, we’re sending a clear message that we will never give in to extortion, because that’s what it was. They tried to extort–the Democrats tried to extort our country,” he added.
Speaking to Breitbart News about the shutdown last week, both moderator Matthew Boyle and Duffy spoke about the coming implications of the Democrat shutdown, with a four percent reduction in flights across the country due to the government shutdown, which was slated to scale up to ten percent the following week.
“The second paycheck was flat zero. They just got notice that the second full paycheck will be a big fat zero. That comes next week. And so there’s been a lot of pressure on the controllers. And when that happens, they’re thinking, I’m asking them to come to work. That’s important. They come to work. But some of them are new to the business. They don’t have a nest egg that they’ve been able to plan for and prepare for,” Duffy said.
“And what that has done is put a lot of pressure on the air traffic control system, and you’ve seen that play out over the course of the month with more delays and more cancellations,” Duffy said, noting that the changes were all about mitigating risk. “And by the way, it’s not in the same place every day. One day it might be in L.A., then it might be in New York, and then it’s Houston or Dallas or Orlando. It’s never the same place. And so we look at data.”
RELATED — Duffy: We Have to Lower Flight Numbers Until Democrats “Open the Damn Government”
On Thursday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett revealed that the Democrat shutdown cost the country roughly $15 billion per week.
