That's 4,000 FAA employees who will continue to be furloughed, 40 safety inspectors who will continue to work unpaid, 70,000 construction workers who will be out of a paycheck, and critical construction projects across the country that will go unfinished for at least a month and might not be finished before winter hits. It's people like Mike MacDonald, a regional vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and a furloughed FAA engineer himself who told me:
Through no fault of our own, we are pawns in this process. That’s so frustrating. I’m typical, I’m a middle-aged guy, I have a mortgage, two kids in college, I have car loans—it’s very, very scary. And it’s over political ideology.
Now, it's also over Eric Cantor deciding thousands of people's jobs weren't worth Congress staying in session an extra day or two.