We hope you weren’t planning on traveling for the holiday.On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced plans to slash airline traffic by ten percent at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports starting on Friday, a move that will cause immense disruption ahead of Thanksgiving weekend, the busiest travel season of the year. It will also pile pressure on Congress to end the ongoing government shutdown, which is the longest in history.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy explained that the reduction in flights will “alleviate the pressure” on the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers, who’ve been working without pay since the shutdown began on October 1.“I think it’s going to lead to more cancellations,” Duffy said at a news conference, per Politico.The administration has not named the specific airports that would be affected by the cuts, but it has long designated a contingent of 30 airports in cities like New York City, Atlanta, Boston, and Washington DC, as being “core” facilities, Politico noted.Duffy’s attention has been spread thin, since he’s also serving as NASA’s interim administrator amid drama for control of the space agency. He’d previously warned of sweeping flight reductions earlier this week, even threatening to cease all flights ahead of the holiday.“If we thought that it was unsafe, we’ll shut the whole airspace down,” Duffy said in a CNBC interview Monday, conceding that the measure includes “an element of risk.”“We won’t let people travel,” he cautioned at the time, adding that “we’re not there at this point” — though it seems to have actually arrived just days later.Even before the shutdown, the FAA had been running on fumes. Its army of around 14,000 air traffic controllers were burdened with making up for a shortfall of around 3,000 vacancies across the agency, which have been present since the Biden presidency, and are now being forced to work without pay. The situation has been so dire that some airlines have started providing meals to the air traffic controllers at the nation’s most vital hubs.Like many government agencies, the FAA was targeted with layoffs early into the Trump administration. Trump also signed an executive order freezing new hires of air traffic controllers, a move that was heavily scrutinized after a plane collided with a helicopter near Reagan National Airport in Washington DC, killing 67 people in what was the deadliest US air disaster in over two decades.A ten percent reduction could mean that as many as 1,800 flights and over 268,000 airline seats would be eliminated, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium, cited by Reuters. Cargo flights will also be affected.FAA chief Bryan Bedford said that the administration is “not going to wait for a safety problem to truly manifest itself” when early action can be taken instead.“We’re trying to be prescriptive, surgical,” Bedford said at the news conference at the Transportation Department’s headquarters, per Politico. While reducing flights might be the safe thing to do, it’s clear that the move is also intended to try to bring Democrats to heel, who refuse to approve Trump’s bill that will see key healthcare subsidies that benefit millions of Americans expire. Trump has shown that he is willing to find money between the couch cushions to fund the military, a significant base of his support, amid the shutdown — but no such flexibility has been afforded the FAA. Trump has also used the shutdown as an opportunity to punish his opponents by withholding billions of dollars of government aid and funding to Democrat-run cities, along with threatening to kill other “Democrat programs.”More on Trump administration: NASA Staff Slam Leadership for “Complete Breakdown in Communication” Under TrumpThe post Head of NASA Announces Huge Reduction in Commercial Flights Ahead of Thanksgiving appeared first on Futurism.