USA. Following the 35-day government shutdown, which concluded on Wednesday evening after the approval of a new budget, the situation in aviation remains tense. While government agencies are now funded, a full return to normal operations will not be automatic. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees, who went unpaid for over a month, will begin returning to their jobs. Essential personnel—air traffic controllers, law enforcement officers, and Social Security workers—will finally receive a date for their back pay. Although many government agencies, such as the Departments of Labor, Transportation, and Agriculture, have updated their websites to reflect the resumption of funding, statistical bodies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will still take weeks to publish data on inflation, employment, and unemployment that they stopped collecting during the shutdown. National museums and parks will also not reopen immediately. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., announced that several of its major museums will begin welcoming visitors again this Friday in a phased reopening. Despite this, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford indicated that the flight caps, implemented for safety due to a shortage of about 3,000 controllers, will remain in effect indefinitely. They noted that while the measure will be kept, the reduction in flights will not reach the planned 10%. "The FAA's safety team is encouraged by the increase in air traffic controllers and is comfortable pausing the reduction schedule to give us time to reassess the airspace," Duffy added. The Trump administration and the aviation industry predict it will take at least a week for all U.S. flight operations to return to normal as controllers and security personnel return to work and receive their back pay. On Thursday, nearly 1,000 cancellations and over 700 delays were recorded nationwide, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware. These figures, while high, are far from the peak of approximately 2,900 cancellations recorded last Sunday.
