WASHINGTON DC (AP) — Republican Sen. Ted Cruz threatened Monday to withhold funding to keep the federal government open past the end of January if reforms to tighten rules on military flights and help prevent deadly crashes like the crash between an Army plane and helicopter over Washington, DC, that killed 67 are not passed by then.
Cruz and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell held a news conference Monday with some of the families of the victims to urge Congress to remove provisions from a massive defense bill that would allow military aircraft to obtain a waiver to operate again without broadcasting their precise location, as they were before the January 29 crash.
But amending the defense bill sends it back to the House and could delay the increase for soldiers and other key provisions.
When asked about helicopter safety concerns Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he hopes to vote to add the legislation that Cruz and Cantwell introduced last summer, called the ROTOR act, to a government funding package this week.
“I think we’re going to get there on this, but it would be really hard to get rid of the defense authorization bill now,” Thune, RS.D., said.
Cruz said he will withhold government funding until the ROTOR act is passed to solve the problem.
Cruz said the provision of the defense bill “was thrown in at the last minute,” noting that it would undo actions taken by President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to make the airspace around DC safer.
“The special carve-out was exactly what caused the January 29 crash that claimed 67 lives,” Cruz said.
Before the crash, military helicopters regularly flew through the crowded airspace around the nation’s capital without using a key system called ADS-B to broadcast their locations. The Federal Aviation Administration began requiring all planes to do this in March.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy, senators, airlines and major transportation unions all strongly criticized the new helicopter safety provisions in the defense bill last week when they came to light.
Cruz and Cantwell said they only became aware that the sprawling military bill would have that language after it was finalized by congressional leaders last week. They began to object strongly as soon as they realized that it contained the exemptions.
The families of the crash victims said the bill would weaken safeguards and set aviation safety back. Amy Hunter, who lost her cousin and his family in the crash, said Trump and his administration have worked to implement safety recommendations from the NTSB, but warned those reforms could be lost in the draft military policy.
Hunter said that “now it threatens to undo everything, all the progress that has already been made, and it will compromise the safety around Reagan National Airport.”
The NTSB won’t release its final report on the cause of the crash until sometime next year, but investigators have already raised a number of major concerns about the 85 near misses around Ronald Reagan National Airport in the years leading up to the crash and the helicopter route that allowed Black Hawks to fly dangerously close to planes landing on the airport’s secondary runway.
The bill Cruz and Cantwell proposed to require all planes to broadcast their locations has broad support from the White House, the FAA, the NTSB and the victims’ families.