The mere prospect of sequestration was supposed to be so unspeakably horrible that even a deeply divided and historically partisan U.S. Congress would never let it happen. The conventional wisdom was that sanity eventually would prevail and a compromise would be reached, thus avoiding billions of dollars in indiscriminate cuts in the federal budget this year and $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next decade.
We should have known better. Wisdom, conventional or otherwise, often doesn’t play a role in U.S. politics. The country’s two primary political parties are concerned more with emasculating each other than they are with governing, but we’ll let someone else editorialize about that.
Here at Flight Safety Foundation and AeroSafety World, our focus is safety, and with $637 million to be slashed from the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) budget this year (by Oct. 1), I think there is ample reason for concern. The budget cuts are going to mean …
