Did they actually lay off anyone? I thought they were just reducing hours (everyone has to take a mandatory day off every 10 days or something like that).

Not to get too OMNI/PR on this topic, but we had a retired FAA employee in the AS forum say that the last couple of times they were close to sequestering, those whose hours were cut were the paper pushers (like the former FAA employee himself)--the front-lines folks necessary for daily operations were not touched.

I tend to agree with Boraxo's take on this whole thing. It feels like a ploy to get the public to support more funding so everyone, paper-pushers included, can keep their cushy jobs. Speaking as a former manager of a small business, I can attest that two-thirds of paper-pushers are unnecessary. They should be the first to go, not the folks actually running the front-end operation (in the DOT's case, that's the controllers).