Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Sunday that air traffic controller shortages are causing a “level of risk” that might necessitate flight delays and cancellations to ensure traveler safety as the government shutdown drags on.

Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” with host Martha Raddatz, Duffy was asked about various issues being caused by air traffic control shortages.

“Americans have experienced major delay. There’s a ground stop this morning at Newark all because air traffic controllers are calling in sick. The FAA is saying that currently, nearly 50% of major air traffic control facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 80% of air traffic controllers are out at New York-area facilities,” Raddatz said. “We know that safety is your greatest concern, but at some point, might you have to shut down portions of the U.S. airspace, maybe even airports? What point are we at that possibility?”

After noting that he’s been speaking with air traffic controllers who are understandably frustrated as “Democrats are focusing on illegal health care,” Duffy stated that the administration will do what’s necessary to ensure passenger safety.

“We will delay, we will cancel any kind of flight across the national airspace to make sure people are safe. But there is a level of risk that gets injected into the system when we have a controller that’s doing two jobs instead of one. We manage that, we look out for it, and safety is the priority. We’ll take all steps necessary, though, to make sure that you get from point A to point B, and you do it safely,” Duffy said.

Transportation Sec. Duffy warns of a “level of risk” when air traffic controllers are stretched too thin, but says that safety is his department’s priority: “We will delay, we will cancel, any kind of flight across the national airspace to make sure people are safe.”… pic.twitter.com/CALMD4sufL

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 2, 2025

Raddatz also pressed Duffy on a timeline: “How close are we to this point where you might have to close airspace or airports as we watch air traffic controllers calling in sick?”

Duffy responded that as expenses pile up for air traffic controllers who aren’t being paid, decisions will have to be made on supplemental employment.

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“And the problem is these controllers, a lot of them are new controllers, or they’re trainee controllers. They don’t make a lot of money, and so they may be the only person that is bringing money into the household. They have to make a decision: do I go to work and not get a paycheck and not put food on the table, or do I drive for Uber or Door Dash or wait tables?”

“I hope Democrats are going to come to their senses and open the government back up. But I would just tell you, as bad as it is, the numbers you just gave … if the government doesn’t open in the next week or two, we’ll look back as these were the good days, not the bad days. It’s only going to get worse,” the Transportation Secretary said.

“If the government doesn’t open in the next week or two, we’ll look back as these were the good days, not the bad days.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks with @martharaddatz about the growing difficulty ATC workers face while going without pay. https://t.co/x73HSd9XsC pic.twitter.com/mZpj7sku0n

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 2, 2025

Advocates for assisted suicide in Canada, where it’s been legal for just under a decade, are pushing to expand the practice to children.

Canada’s euthanasia program, known as MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying), started back in 2016 for people whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” and wanted to end their lives. It’s already been expanded — both expanding the pool of which adults are eligible and how it can be administered, leading to an explosion of suicides in recent years.

Now, groups are calling for minors as young as 12 years old to be included in the government-funded suicide program. One advocacy group, called “Dying With Dignity Canada,” recommends minors as young as 12 be included in the program, and goes as far as to suggest 16 and 17-year-olds shouldn’t even need parental consent to be killed by a doctor if they fit broad criteria. 

The group calls for assessing age eligibility based on “maturity” rather than “chronological age.”

Dying With Dignity Canada

Experts say the advocacy shows there was merit to the “slippery slope” argument made against the law from the outset.

“There is a kind of gruesome, relentless logic at work here, and this is why the logical ‘slippery slope’ argument is a valid argument,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and director at Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Daily Wire. “Once you cross the line of allowing doctors to kill patients, once you cross the line of accepting the basic premise of the euthanasia movement — which is that some lives are not worth living and therefore these people should be killed by the medical profession, then it’s very hard to argue that there should be any limitations.” 

The MAiD program started back in 2016, with only people whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” eligible. In 99% of cases, a medical professional administers a substance that causes a person’s death, which is technically euthanasia. In the other cases, a person will be provided a substance to self-administer to cause their own death, which is defined as assisted suicide.

There’s only been expansion of these procedures since the creation of MAiD, with massive growth in 2021, when chronic illness and disability were included as sole reasons for someone to be euthanized. 

With an increasing number of people being euthanized every year, 2023 data shows more than 15,000 people were killed via MAiD. That accounts for 4.7% of all deaths in Canada. Put another way, about 1 in 20 Canadians are being euthanized. 

Advocates for including so-called “mature” minors in the MAiD program argue that children need more autonomy over their health care, and note that minors can already consent or refuse certain medical treatments, so including them, they argue, would be consistent. They say it’s about compassion. 

The “slippery slope” argument, he said, is playing out in real time in Canada. “Your basic premise, your basic argument is people should be able to do this on the basis of one of two things: autonomy and choice on the one hand, or pain and suffering on the other hand. And people can always invoke pain and suffering,” he said. “Who’s to say that they’re not suffering more than someone who qualified under the law, right?”

Kheriaty said that just a few years ago, he may have viewed the movement to euthanize minors as fringe. He doesn’t view it that way anymore.

“A few years ago, I would’ve said, ‘No, I don’t think the Canadian regime is going to go that far to have so-called ‘mature minors,’ adolescents avail themselves of euthanasia,'” he said. “But now, I’m sad to say I wouldn’t put it past them.”

In addition to the movement to include minors in the MAiD program, there’s a strong push to include people who suffer solely from mental health issues, like depression. That’s set to take effect in 2027. But Kheriaty says it’s already happening in Canada.

“There have been at least a few cases described and reported widely in the last couple of years in Canada,” he said. “I remember one case of, I believe it was a 27-year-old female, a woman in her twenties whose sole diagnosis was autism and ADHD, neither of which are terminal conditions.”

“So even if it’s not officially legalized in Canada yet, that psychiatric conditions can be used as the sole criteria for euthanasia,” he said. “There have been reported cases in the literature where clearly that’s been happening already.”

Kheriaty believes opposition must come from the medical community. 

“Most people who avail themselves of this have a deep-seated fear that they’re going to be a burden on others,” he explained. “They’re gonna be a burden on society. They’re gonna be a burden on the medical community that’s not gonna want to care for them.”

“And we have to respond, rather than abandoning the patient by saying, ‘Yes, here’s the poison pill,’ or, ‘I’ll administer the poison injection to you.’ We have to respond by saying, ‘No, it’s a privilege to care for you.’ It’s a privilege to walk with you through what might be the final stage of your life — in the cases where someone has been diagnosed with the terminal illness. Or, it’s a privilege to care for you if you’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness and maybe it’s been difficult to treat. Let’s continue to work to find ways to treat this.”

A failure to do so would hurt society’s most vulnerable.

“Assisted suicide is both dangerous and inhumane, and I would say all the more so true of euthanasia, because it abandons vulnerable patients who need help, treatment efforts at healing, or when healing or cure is not possible, they need support and care.”