A wing and a prayer

By N.B. | WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE sequester is looming. Big cuts to America's federal budget are set to take effect automatically on Friday March 1st, unless Congress can agree on a new budget deal. If it does not, $85 billion will be cut from the 2013 budget and $1.1 trillion over the next decade. The axe will fall mainly on the defence budget, from which 8% will be chopped, but 5% must also be found from non-military programmes. One of those, says the government, is air travel. Last week Ray LaHood, President Obama's transportation secretary, warned Americans that the sequester could lead to massive air travel delays across the country.

Mr LaHood said that about 10% of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which monitors air traffic safety in America, would be given a day off without pay ("furloughed") on any given day after the sequester hits. The FAA faces around $600m in cuts over the rest of the fiscal year, and would be forced to eliminate midnight shifts at over 60 air traffic control towers around the country. The FAA is even considering closing many other facilities entirely.

Many of the facilities that would be closed, or where midnight shifts would be eliminated, are not crucial transit hubs. Air traffic control at New York's JFK, Chicago's O'Hare, Washington's Dulles, and many other enormous airports would be unaffected. But many business travellers rely on small and medium-sized airports to get to hard-to-reach places or to find cheaper flights. Those travellers could face big problems.

Although the big airports won't lose shifts, they will still be subject to the furloughs, and Mr LaHood has warned travellers to busy airspaces like those over New York, San Francisco, and Chicago that they can expect as much as 90 minutes' worth of added delays. That is because, as the New York Timeshas reported, the FAA is considering requiring increased spacing between planes. This is intended to give air traffic control a greater margin of error since there will be fewer air traffic controllers available to work.

If this all seems a bit haphazard, that's because it is. America's divided government and increasingly dysfunctional politics mean that policies are often made at the last minute, and government agencies have little time to plan or adjust to them. Federal employees and travellers alike are waiting for the political brinkmanship to end.