WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted Tuesday that there could be chaos in the skies next week if the government shutdown drags on and air traffic controllers miss a second paycheck.

There have already been numerous delays at airports across the country — sometimes hours long — because the Federal Aviation Administration slows down or stops traffic temporarily anytime it is short on controllers. Last weekend saw some of the worst staff shortages and on Sunday, flights at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey were delayed for several hours.

Duffy and the head of the air traffic controllers union have both warned that the situation will only get worse the longer the shutdown continues and the financial pressure continues to grow on people who are forced to work without pay. FAA employees already missed one paycheck on Oct. 28. Their next payday is scheduled for next Tuesday.

“Many of the controllers said ‘A lot of us can navigate missing one paycheck. Not everybody, but a lot of us can. None of us can manage missing two paychecks,’” Duffy said. “So if you bring us to a week from today, Democrats, you will see mass chaos. You will see mass flight delays. You’ll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace, because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have air traffic controllers.”

Most of the flight disruptions so far during the shutdown have been isolated and temporary. But if delays become more widespread and start to ripple throughout the system, the pressure will mount on Congress to reach an agreement to end the shutdown.

It’s difficult to predict how much worse the situation will get once controllers miss a second paycheck. The impact of the staff shortages could also be magnified if controllers coordinated a large effort to call out sick across a certain region of the country. Both the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and Duffy have urged controllers not to consider that and continue reporting to work.

Mike McCormick, who used to oversee air traffic control for the FAA before he retired and is now a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said closing down part of the airspace and forcing planes to fly around an area is routinely done when there is a major thunderstorm. The FAA may also close down part of the airspace if it is short on controllers at one of its regional radar centers that directs planes flying at high altitude across the country. This move is very similar to a ground delay program that FAA uses at an airport when it is short on controllers there or encounters an equipment failure.

Major airlines, aviation unions and the travel industry have been urging Congress to end this shutdown as soon as possible by voting to support the clean funding resolution that Republicans have proposed.

The U.S. Travel Association said in a letter to Congressional leaders this week that the economy has already lost more than $4 billion because of the shutdown, and the industry worries the impact will get significantly worse if the shutdown continues into the holiday travel season.

“With Thanksgiving, the busiest travel period of the year, imminently approaching, the consequences of a continued shutdown will be immediate, deeply felt by millions of American travelers, and economically devastating to communities in every state,” the U.S. Travel Association said.

Normally, airlines strive to have at least 80% of their flights depart and arrive within 15 minutes of when they are scheduled. Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, the total number of delays overall has not fallen significantly below that goal because most of the disruptions so far have been no worse than what happens when a major thunderstorm moves across an airport.

But on Sunday, only about 56% of Newark’s departures were on time, and the Orlando airport reported that only about 70% of its flights were on time, according to Cirium.

As of midday Tuesday, there have been 1,932 flight delays reported across the United States, according to www.FlightAware.com. That is lower than what is typical although the FAA did say that flights in Phoenix were being delayed Tuesday morning because of staffing shortages. Strong winds are also causing delays at the Newark and LaGuardia airports Tuesday.

OJAI, Calif. (AP) — Diane Ladd, a three-time Academy Award nominee and actor of rare timing and intensity whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” to the scheming parent in “Wild at Heart,” has died at 89.

Ladd’s death was announced Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern at her side. Dern, who called Ladd her “amazing hero” and “profound gift of a mother,′ did not immediately cite a cause of death.

“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern wrote. “We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

A gifted comic and dramatic performer, Ladd had a long career in television and on stage before breaking through as a film performer in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 release “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” She earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for her turn as the acerbic, straight-talking Flo, and went on to appears in dozens of movies over the following decades. Her many credits included “Chinatown,” “Primary Colors” and two other movies for which she received best supporting nods, “Wild at Heart” and “Rambling Rose,” both of which co-starred her daughter. She also continued to work in television, with appearances in “ER,” “Touched by Angel” and “Alice,” the spinoff from “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” among others.

Through marriage and blood relations, Ladd was tied to the arts. Tennessee Williams was a second cousin and first husband Bruce Dern, Laura’s father, was himself an Academy Award nominee. Ladd and Laura Dern achieved the rare feat of mother-and-daughter nominees for their work in “Rambling Rose” and they also were memorably paired in “Wild at Heart,” a personal favorite of Ladd’s and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. In the dark, farcical David Lynch noir, her character, Marietta, is willing to try anything — including murder — to keep her daughter (Laura Dern) away from her ex-con lover, played by Nicolas Cage. Ladd would be called upon by the director for some Lynchian touches, and countered with some of her own.

“One day, the script said that Marietta gets in bed, curls up with her baby dog, and is sucking her thumb,” she told Vulture in 2024. “I looked at him and said, ‘David, I don’t want to do that.” He said, ’What do you want to do? I said, ‘I want to put on a long satin nightgown, I want to stand in the middle of the bed holding a martini and drinking it, and I want to sway to the old music within my head.’ He said OK, I did it, and he loved it.”

A native of Laurel, Mississippi, Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner and was apparently destined to stand out. In her 2006 memoir, “Spiraling Through the School of Life,” she remembered being told by her great-grandmother that she would one day in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences. Before “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” she had been working in television since the 1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with shows including “Perry Mason,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Big Valley.”

By the mid-1970s, she had lived out her fate well enough to tell The New York Times that no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.

“Now I don’t say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”

Ladd was married three times, and divorced twice — from Bruce Dern and from William A. Shea, Jr. In 1976, around the time her second marriage ended, she told the Times that neither of her husbands knew “how to show love.”

“I come from the South and from a man, my father, who gave me rocking‐chair love. My people pass love around, and why I selected two men who needed someone to give love and didn’t know how to give it. …” She paused. “I hope I won’t repeat that again.”

Ladd’s third marriage, to author-former PepsiCo executive Robert Charles Hunter, lasted from 1999 until his death in August.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government shutdown is poised to become the longest ever this week as the impasse between Democrats and Republicans has dragged into a new month. Millions of people could lose food aid benefits, health care subsidies are set to expire and there are few real talks between the parties over how to end it.

President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats who are demanding negotiations to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year for millions of Americans. Echoing congressional Republicans, the president said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” he’ll negotiate only when the government is reopened.

Trump’s comments signal the shutdown could drag on for some time as federal workers, including air traffic controllers, are set to miss additional paychecks and there’s uncertainty over whether 42 million Americans who receive federal food aid will be able to access the assistance. Senate Democrats have voted 13 times against reopening the government, insisting they need Trump and Republicans to negotiate with them first.

The president said Democrats “have lost their way” and predicted they’ll capitulate to Republicans.

“I think they have to,” Trump said. “And if they don’t vote, it’s their problem.”

He also reiterated his pleas to Republican leaders to change Senate rules and scrap the filibuster. Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected that idea since Trump’s first term, arguing the rule requiring 60 votes to overcome any objections in the Senate is vital to the institution and has allowed them to stop Democratic policies when they’re in the minority.

“Republicans have to get tougher,” Trump told CBS. “If we end the filibuster, we can do exactly what we want.”

With the two parties at a standstill, the shutdown, now in its 33rd day and approaching its sixth week, appears likely to become the longest in history. The previous record was set in 2019, when Trump demanded Congress give him money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

A potentially decisive week

Trump’s push on the filibuster could prove a distraction for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Republican senators who’ve opted instead to stay the course as the consequences of the shutdown become more acute.

Republicans are hoping at least some Democrats will eventually give them the votes they need as moderates have been in weekslong talks with rank-and-file Republicans about potential compromises that could guarantee votes on health care in exchange for reopening the government. Republicans need five additional Democrats to pass their bill.

“We need five with a backbone to say we care more about the lives of the American people than about gaining some political leverage,” Thune said on the Senate floor as the Senate left Washington for the weekend on Thursday.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday there’s a group of people talking about ”a path to fix the health care debacle” and a commitment from Republicans not to fire more federal workers. But it’s unclear if those talks could produce a meaningful compromise.

Far apart on Obamacare subsidies

Trump said in the “60 Minutes” interview the Affordable Care Act — often known as Obamacare because it was signed and championed by then-President Barack Obama — is “terrible” and if the Democrats vote to reopen the government, “we will work on fixing the bad health care that we have right now.”

Democrats feel differently, arguing the marketplaces set up by the ACA are working as record numbers of Americans have signed up for the coverage. But they want to extend subsidies first enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic so premiums won’t go up for millions of people on Jan. 1.

“We want to sit down with Thune, with (House Speaker Mike) Johnson, with Trump, and negotiate a way to address this horrible health care crisis,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said last week.

No appetite for bipartisanship

As Democrats have pushed Trump and Republicans to negotiate, Trump has showed little interest in doing so. He called for an end to the Senate filibuster after a trip to Asia while the government was shut down.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News Channel the president has spoken directly to Thune and Johnson about the filibuster. But a spokesman for Thune said Friday that his position hasn’t changed, and Johnson said on Sunday that Republicans traditionally have resisted calling for an end to the filibuster because it protects them from “the worst impulses of the far-left Democrat Party.”

Trump said on “60 Minutes” he likes Thune but “I disagree with him on this point.”

The president has spent much of the shutdown mocking Democrats, posting videos of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries in a Mexican sombrero. The White House website has a satirical “My Space” page for Democrats, a parody based on the social media site that was popular in the early 2000s. “We just love playing politics with people’s livelihoods,” the page reads.

Democrats have repeatedly said that they need Trump to get serious and weigh in. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said that he hopes the shutdown could end “this week” because Trump is back in Washington.

Republicans “can’t move on anything without a Trump sign off,” Warner said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Record-breaking shutdown

The 35-day shutdown that lasted from December 2018 to January 2019 ended when Trump retreated from his demands over a border wall. That came amid intensifying delays at the nation’s airports and multiple missed paydays for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on ABC’s “This Week” that there have already been delays at several airports “and it’s only going to get worse.”

Many of the workers are “confronted with a decision,” he said. “Do I put food on my kids’ table, do I put gas in the car, do I pay my rent or do I go to work and not get paid?”

As flight delays around the country increased, New York City’s emergency management department posted on Sunday that Newark Airport was under a ground delay because of “staffing shortages in the control tower” and that they were limiting arrivals to the airport.

“The average delay is about 2 hours, and some flights are more than 3 hours late,” the account posted. “FAA planning notes show a possibility of a full ground stop later if staffing shortages or demand increases.”

SNAP crisis

Also in the crossfire are the 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits. The Department of Agriculture planned to withhold $8 billion needed for payments to the food program starting on Saturday until two federal judges ordered the administration to fund it.

House Democratic leader Jeffries, D-N.Y., accused Trump and Republicans of attempting to “weaponize hunger.” He said that the administration has managed to find ways for funding other priorities during the shutdown, but is slow-walking pushing out SNAP benefits despite the court orders.

“But somehow they can’t find money to make sure that Americans don’t go hungry,” Jeffries said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in his own CNN appearance Sunday, said the administration continues to await direction from the courts.

“The best way for SNAP benefits to get paid is for Democrats — for five Democrats to cross the aisle and reopen the government,” Bessent said.