After being chastised by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood for going on vacation before passing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, Congress announced a deal Thursday that would temporarily end the partial shutdown of the agency.
Designed to keep the FAA open through Congress's vacation, the vote for the temporary funding extension will take place on Friday, Aug. 5. However, this latest extension gets more than 4,000 furloughed FAA employees and laid-off construction workers back on the jobs.
"The idea that they have left town on their vacations and they are receiving a paycheck and they talk a lot about jobs. They give good speeches about it. I want them to walk the walk. Come back to D.C.," LaHood told CNN this morning. “Don't hold the American jobs and American people hostage over controversial issues that were not a problem on 20 other times when Congress passed an extension," LaHood said as he tried to shame lawmakers to come back to Washington to pass the legislation.
The FAA has been partially shut down since July 23.