Executive action to aid airlines is floated

WASHINGTON — White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday that the administration is looking at taking executive action to prevent airline furloughs in the absence of a deal with Congress on coronavirus relief legislation.

Meadows’ comments in a Politico Live event came a day after American Airlines said that it would furlough or lay off some 19,000 workers starting in October unless the federal government steps in with billions more in relief for struggling airlines.

Delta Air Lines also intends to furlough nearly 2,000 pilots effective Oct. 1, according to the pilots’ union.

“I think everybody, every time they hear that we’re going to do executive actions, they don’t believe me,” Meadows said. “We’ve got four executive actions that actually the president took; we’re going to take a few others. Because if Congress is not going to work, this president is going to get to work and solve some problems. So hopefully we can help out the airlines and keep some of those employees from being furloughed.”

Meadows did not elaborate on what action might be taken, and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Congress in March passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which devoted more than $50 billion in grants and loans to the airline industry. As a condition of $25 billion in grant money, the airlines had to agree to keep workers on the job through Sept. 30.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused airline travel to fall sharply and has decimated revenue. Though travel has recovered somewhat from the low points in March and April, it still hasn’t come back to its pre-pandemic levels.

Congress and the administration agreed on four bipartisan bills in March and April that pumped some $3 trillion into the economy. A new round of negotiations started up in July between congressional Democrats and the administration, but multiple meetings and hours of talks failed to produce a result, and the House and Senate adjourned without action.

Meanwhile, many of the programs authorized in the CARES Act and other legislation in the spring have expired or will do so soon, including a moratorium on evictions and a $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit enhancement that ran out July 31 for some 30 million jobless Americans. In addition, the small-business Paycheck Protection Program stopped accepting new grant applications.

Senate Republicans have begun discussing narrower legislation that would revive some of these programs while sending billions of dollars to schools, investing more in virus testing and tracing, and establishing a liability shield for businesses and others.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who had been a holdout on a previous Senate GOP bill, said in an interview Wednesday that he is now supportive of a “targeted” bill with a price tag below $1 trillion.

Democrats’ starting point was a $3.4 trillion bill passed by the House in May. A Republican bill could not pass in the Senate without Democratic votes.

With a bipartisan deal unlikely to emerge in the near term, attention is already shifting to the Sept. 30 deadline when government funding expires and many agencies will begin to shut down if Congress does not act. That deadline will force legislative action that could become a vehicle for passing some new virus relief provisions.