Understanding Government

Overlooked in the agreement reached by Barack Obama and Congress on the debt ceiling is that an entire federal agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — has shut down with Congress on vacation until September. That means, among other issues,  that the agency has no authorization to keep funding projects like the expansion of O’Hare airport in Chicago or, as Nathan Hurst of the Detroit News reports on today, the reconstruction of a taxi way at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

The agency has shut down because of a dispute over how airline workers can unionize and how much subsidies should be provided to rural airports. These are fairly significant issues — but ones that a Congress that cares in the slightest about a functional aviation agency should have been able to solve.

Paul Merrion of Crain’s Chicago Business breaks down which Chicago companies did the most lobbying in Washington, D.C. during the second quarter. Defense contracting behemoth Boeing unsurprisingly did the most, spending about $4.4 million on lobbying efforts. The Exelon Corp. energy company was second, with $1.6 million.

What the numbers show is that while major companies have a full staff of lobbyists, lobbying expenditures wax and wane depending on whether the company has specific business in Washington. Boeing, for example, spent a lot more on lobbying while trying to procure a $35 billion tanker deal from the Air Force.

Alex Keefe of WBEZ-Chicago Public Radio reports that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will lay off 625 city workers, “after labor leaders blew a Friday deadline to come up with a list of cost-saving measures in order to avoid pink slips.” Emanuel is dealing with a major municipal deficit and has a legitimate beef with some city workers, who are not making reasonable concessions that would save the city some money. However, Emanuel is the “Scott Walker of Chicago” in who the mayor said he would lay off: city water department call operators, city custodians, seasonal street sweepers.

Exempt from the list are police and fire fighters, even though these professions take up 2/3 of the city’s payroll costs. Like Walker, Emanuel seems to think that police and fire fighters are a more noble kind of public employee than, say, custodians.

The Associated Press reports that Jody Weis, the former head of the Chicago Police Department, will take a position as a deputy director with the Chicago Crime Commission, a non-profit dedicated to fighting local crime. Weis is a pretty interesting figure. He presided over a steep crime decline in Chicago even as a budget crunch forced the city to take cops off the street. Yet Weis was pushed out of his position because he clashed with rank-and-file police.

A deputy director of a fairly anonymous non-profit seems to be a backward career move. But maybe Weis will emerge as an influential voice in a city where politicians and media are fixated on violent crime.

Midway airport

Not if a bill proposed by Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin becomes law, reports Paul Merrion of Crain’s Chicago Business. The legislation, “would make make privatization of Midway Airport and other major transportation assets such as Amtrak far more difficult, if not impossible, by requiring the federal government to be reimbursed for its investment in that infrastructure before a deal could go through.” The legislation appears to be the nail in the coffin for a plan to privatize Midway. But Durbin’s bill could signal a broader push back against the privatization of what are essentially public utilities. (more…)