"Face the Nation," July 2, 2023

Interview

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Well, if you look at the overall picture, we've seen a lot of improvements.

But we had a hard few days with severe weather at the beginning of the week, and that definitely put enormous pressure on the system. Now, the good news is, on Friday, we saw, according to TSA, a record number of airline passengers, probably the most ever in America, and we saw those cancellation rates stay low.

Right now, we're below 2 percent. But they really shot up at the first part of the week, largely because of severe weather hitting some of our key hubs.

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I think most passengers understand that no one can control the weather.

But anything that's under the control of the airlines and anything that we can do on the FAA side, we need to continue pushing to make sure that there's the smoothest possible experience for air passengers everywhere.

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Well, first of all, let me be very clear that, even according to the industry's own data, air traffic control staffing issues account for less than 10 percent of the delay minutes in the system.

But I would rather that number be zero. So even though this isn't the number one cause or even the number two cause of flight disruptions, it is something that is very important to tackle, and we're doing exactly that.

We're hiring 1,500 new air traffic controllers this year. Our plan is to hire another 1,800 traffic controllers next year. We're also working on staffing models that can better address the needs on the ground, and cooperating where possible and where appropriate with airlines on things that can make better use of the same national airspace.

Remember, we have the most complex national airspace in the world. But there are things we can do to manage it more efficiently. FAA is using new technology, for example, to open up routes that are more direct using GPS, which means less flight time, and ultimately can contribute to less congestion.

In the Florida airspace, we actually have enough commercial space launches taking place now that that can be a factor, as that airspace gets closed down, especially on those busy travel days. So we've been engaging the space industry to try to keep those launch windows clear of when there is the most traffic.

And when we have severe weather situations, like we had a few days ago, have set up a very tight operational cadence, working tightly and closely with airline operational managers to route aircraft in a way that always puts safety first, but also makes the most of the opportunities we have.

So whether we're talking about day-to-day ops and tactics, or whether we're talking about the bigger picture of staffing air traffic control for the future...

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... we're moving very aggressively on that.

And now's the time for these conversations, because the FAA reauthorization bill, which will cover the next five years, is moving through the Senate as we speak.

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You know, part of what we've been working to do is make our infrastructure more resilient for the future.

You know, the -- the hard reality doesn't care about political debates. And if you have what used to be a 500-year flood happening other -- every other year, and you got a road that gets washed out, and you put it back, and it gets washed out again, that doesn't make any sense.

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I think what's really revealing is that there's no evidence that this Web designer was ever even approached by a same-sex couple looking for services to support their wedding.

So, you're seeing more and more of these cases and these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and designed to chip away at rights. And I think the bigger picture here, when you look at the Supreme Court taking away a woman's right to choose, you look at Friday's decision diminishing the equality of same-sex couples, you look at a number of the decisions that have been made, they pose a question that is even deeper than these big cases.

And the question is this: Did we just live to see the high watermark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away? Because, up until now, not uniformly, but, overall, each generation was able to say that it enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.

And those decisions have added up and affected so many people, including me, of course...

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... as I'm getting ready to go back to my husband and our twins for the rest of this morning, thinking about the fact that the existence of our family is -- is only a reality because of a one- vote margin on the Supreme Court a few years ago.

These are the kinds of things that are at stake. And we have a Supreme Court that is very much out of step with how most Americans view these issues.

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You know, that's really not a comparison that is relevant to this case.

But, more importantly, I think it's really telling that you have to think of these far-fetched hypotheticals in order to justify decisions that are actually going to have much worse impacts in the real world. And I think this, again, goes back to the broader agenda of the culture wars that are being fired up.

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