Samuel Martin - 18 Accidents, But Crash Site Clues Lost in Government Shutdown

18 Accidents, 32 Dead. But Crash Site Clues May Have Been Lost in Shutdown.

Summary
During the longest ever government shutdown, one of the agencies that was furloughed was the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates all major highway and airplane accidents in the United States. During the 35 day lapse in investigations, there were 18 major accidents that killed at least 32 people, none of which can be investigated properly because of the lack of investigators. To go back to the scenes of terrible accidents over a month after they occurred, it will be almost impossible to figure out what happened, what went wrong, and how it can be prevented in the future. The airplane crashes will be defaulted to operator error, because there is no proof to state otherwise. The pilots will probably loose their license for this, even though it is in no way their fault that the federal government didn't pay their investigators to keep working. News has developed that there were a significant number of investigators that were being paid to investigate crashes internationally, and critics are questioning why they weren't furloughed and why they weren't brought back to investigate domestic accidents.

Analysis
The article was written as a joint project in New York and San Francisco on January 31, 2019, which means it is up to date and that it is comprehensive because the accidents happened all over the country. I already knew that the government shutdown effected various unexpected parts of the country, but I didn't realize that the NTSB was a federal agency. This relates to the fifth government shutdown in 1990, under the H.W. Bush administration, when the EPA, NPS, Departments of Labor, Housing, Urban Development and more were shut down over the issue of cuts to medicare. The audience of this article is all of the US because we are all effected by the changes the NTSB makes to transportation policies. The authors of this article are Richard Oppel and Thomas Fuller, who are the bureau chiefs for New York and San Francisco, respectively. The article was written to inform the citizens about the federal agencies that were furloughed during the shutdown and how they effect us. This is important because the society is still reeling from the effects of the shutdown and we need to know all the ways it effects us.

Source
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/ntsb-accidents-government-shutdown.html