Just what one wants to hear ahead of a last-minute flight to see my dad one last time. These feckless assholes don’t give a (pun intended) flying fuck about Thanksgiving, or people going about regular daily commerce.

Flight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the United States spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.

If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that flight reductions could reach 20% if the shutdown persists, and on Sunday he predicted a “substantial” number of people in the US would be unable to celebrate the upcoming holidays with their families if the shutdown wasn’t resolved.

“You’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle,” Duffy said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “We have a number of people who want to get home for the holidays. They want to see their family … Listen, many of them are not going to be able to get on an airplane because there are not going to be that many flights that fly if this thing doesn’t open back up.”

The FAA’s requirement for airlines to cut 4% of daily flights at 40 “high traffic” US airports began Friday and represented an attempt to ease the mounting pressure on air traffic controllers. Like other federal employees, those controllers have not been paid for weeks amid the government shutdown, which has become the longest in history and reached its 40th day.

Those damn Democrats interested in reducing insurance premiums for shitty coverage.