Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned on Tuesday that disruptions at U.S. airports will get worse as the government shutdown continues, using some of the most alarming language yet about the state of air travel. Air traffic controllers and TSA agents are currently working without pay, which has caused an uptick in workers calling out sick as they scramble to find side jobs to pay their bills.
Duffy noted that air traffic controllers will receive an email pay stub on Thursday indicating that their paycheck next week will be a “big fat zero.”
“Many of the controllers said a lot of us can navigate missing one paycheck. Not everybody, but a lot of us can. None of us can manage missing two paychecks,” Duffy said during a press conference in Pennsylvania that was supposed to be about that state’s train system.
Duffy pinned the blame on elected Democrats, who have said they won’t provide the votes necessary to reopen the government until congressional Republicans are willing to make concessions about health care funding. Americans are set to see their health insurance premiums soar in 2026 after the Republicans failed to extend covid-era tax credits for Obamacare in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill that was passed in July.
“So if you bring us to a week from today, Democrats, you will see mass chaos,” said Duffy. “You will see mass flight delays. You’ll see mass cancellations. And you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have the air traffic controllers.”
All eyes are currently on air traffic controllers, since the one-month mark seemed to be a real breaking point for the government shutdown of 2019, which lasted 35 days. The current shutdown started on Oct. 1 and is currently in its 35th day, which means it will officially be the longest shutdown in U.S. history on Wednesday. Duffy suggested that fewer air traffic controllers were calling out sick during this shutdown compared to 2019 but warned it’s going to get worse.
“These hardworking Americans have bills they have to pay, and they’re being forced to make decisions and choices,” said Duffy. “Do they go to work as an air traffic controller or do they have to find a different job to get resources, money to put food on their table to put gas in their car? And as every day goes by, I think the problem is going to only get worse, not better.”
Duffy’s warnings have become increasingly more dramatic each day the shutdown drags on. And travelers are seeing it with their own eyes at the airport. More than 5,000 flights traveling to and from U.S. airports were delayed on Sunday alone, according to NBC News, and travelers at two major airports in Texas—Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport—saw major delays on Monday.
Duffy also talked about the lasting damage that a prolonged shutdown will have on the willingness of people to consider air traffic control as a profession. There was already a shortage of between 2,000-3,000 air traffic controllers before the shutdown, according to Duffy.
“Do they want to go into a profession where they can have a shutdown and they cannot be paid? That has affected our pipeline,” said Duffy.
It’s unclear who might blink first to end the shutdown. Republicans have refused to come to the table and Democrats haven’t publicly signaled a desire to fold without real concessions on health care. But reporting from politics-focused news outlets like Axios has been giving hints from behind the scenes in recent days that things could soon change.
Centrist Democrats and Republicans in the House are reportedly proposing a plan that would extend the health care tax credits for two years while tightening rules for cracking down on supposed fraud, according to Axios. And Senate majority leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, told Axios, “We’re getting close to an off ramp.”
But all of the negotiations can be heavily dependent on whatever President Donald Trump decides to do on a given day. The Trump administration said in a court filing Monday that it would pay out roughly half of the USDA contingency funds that are set aside for SNAP benefits in an emergency like this. But Trump wrote a new Truth Social post on Tuesday contradicting government lawyers, stating that he wouldn’t actually pay out the benefits to the states.
“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump wrote.
Local communities across the country are holding food drives for government workers who have been working without pay or furloughed. And while a 2019 law requires furloughed employees to be paid after a shutdown ends, the Washington Post reports Tuesday that Trump’s government has hinted furloughed workers won’t get paid after all.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memo in October that those workers shouldn’t be paid and the Post notes that furlough notices no longer include reassurances that backpay will ever come. Such a move would obviously attract legal challenges, but those can take considerable time and would depend on courts upholding the law.
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