Well, today marks the 45th day of the partial government shutdown. Yesterday, it surpassed the previous record, so now it's the longest in US history. It was thought that the Senate may make a procedural move to push the House funding bill forward via a voice vote, but that, like all the other attempts to end the standoff, went nowhere this morning. The argument centered on funding ICE TSA agents, and they've been working without pay for a month and a half. Congressional members unable to reach an agreement, skipping town for the two-week spring recess, leaving the situation at our airports in chaos. About 500 TSA agents have quit. More than 3,500 have called out, resulting in hours-long security lines and missed flights. Last week, in a move cheered by many passengers and airport workers, Delta suspended all specialty congressional flight perks, including airport escort service. In his first interview since Delta paused congressional perks, Liz Clayman spoke exclusively with Delta CEO Ed Bastian about that and a lot more.
The stalemate between Congress members continues. DHS and TSA are not funded. It's unbelievable this is continuing to go on. What as the leader of a major airline is going through your mind right now?
We are beyond frustrated at the lack of leadership that's coming out of Congress. Thank God the president enacted an emergency order to ensure the TSA workers are paid. Hopefully in the next day or so they will start to receive that back pay that they so rightfully deserve. I appreciate the work that they have done. I appreciate the patience of our customers that have to go through this ordeal, but it's a travesty.
Well, senators actually adjourned until Thursday. Nothing happened today. So, this obviously is stretching on. You were the first airline to eliminate at least temporarily the perks that Congress gets from Delta, these escorts to the gate, all this other stuff. What brought you to that decision, which by the way is getting very hard marks from a lot of people?
Well, given the lack of leadership that we've seen coming from our elected officials, the fact that we would continue to extend courtesy opportunities for them to bypass the mess that they've created, we want to make sure they understand what they're and stand in line just like everybody else.
Yeah. Like the rest of us peons out there, you know, travelers who have to deal with that.
In fact, I would say one other thing though, Liz, since the emergency order was implemented, we have seen the agents starting to come back to work. We've seen the lines are starting to dissipate over this past weekend. It wasn't nearly as bad as the prior couple of weekends and hopefully this thing is getting settled down pretty soon.
We are hearing from our producer at Atlanta's airport in Hartsfield that some have seen the paychecks come through their banks. So that's certainly helpful. Some of them are a few short, several hours. So things have to be worked out. But let me just get back to the branding experts who say, in fact, Scott Galloway of NYU called it what you did, brilliant and great brand-enhancing move by Delta. Have you heard from any congressional members complaining that where's my escort?
We let their offices know ahead of time and I think they understand why we had to do what we did.
How long will the pause continue for those perks?
At a minimum until everything is back and running normally, the workers are paid and at that point we'll decide whether we continue it.
Not only are you dealing with that, but there's the war right now and jet fuel prices have doubled. This is unbelievable. Already European airlines are saying that they may run out of fuel in the next couple of weeks. There may be an unbelievable supply crunch. That is not happening here yet.
Correct. Yeah, we have sufficient supply in our country and we're not anticipating those type of shortages. In Europe, I would anticipate if this continues over the next several weeks, you'll start to see not wholesale reductions in flying, but you'll see some reductions that some airlines will be forced to take.
Well, United says they're cutting about 5% of their flights just to conserve all of this. What about you guys?
We're looking at those flights and we are certainly in the spring getting ahead of this and reducing those flights, the red eyes and some of the flights that probably don't have the same level of revenue capability attached to them and trying to conserve fuel and trying to conserve staffing too.
Delta has its own refinery. I don't think a lot of people know that, but your predecessor Richard Anderson back in 2012 bought an aging refinery in Pennsylvania to deal with this precise possibility.
