Donald Trump ‘to come up with aid package for airlines’

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said President Donald Trump was considering executive action to prevent airlines furloughs after American Airlines said it would furlough 19,000 workers in October.

Meadows said Wednesday, with negotiations on a new coronavirus relief package at a standstill, the president was prepared to act. 

‘I think everybody every time they hear that we’re going to do executive actions they don’t believe me,’ Meadows told Politico’s Playbook in an interview. ‘We’re looking at other executive actions.’

‘We’ve got four executive actions that actually the president took, we’re going to take a few others. Because if Congress is not going to work, this president is going to get to work and solve some problems. So hopefully we can help out the airlines and keep some of those employees from being furloughed,’ he noted. 

He did not offer specifics on what the executive orders may involve.  

He noted he’s talked to the big airlines about the issues they’re facing and the potential furloughs.

‘I talked to … United, American and Delta, all three of them. And any time that you can keep employers with employees not being furloughed or laid off is a good thing. And so we’ve raised this issue. It would take a CARES package, I believe, to do it,’ he noted. 

Delta also intends to furlough nearly 2,000 pilots starting in October, according to the pilots’ union.

U.S. airlines received more than $50 billion in grants and loans from the $2 trillion Cares Act in March. A condition on $25 billion of that money was that they had to agree to keep workers on the job through Sept. 30. 

The industry has lobbied for another $25 billion in the next round of relief money as the coronavirus pandemic has caused airline travel to plummet. 

‘It will definitely take Congress acting to keep all of the job requirements in place,’ Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, wrote on Twitter after Meadows made his comments. 

Talks between Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Democratic Leaders Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer are at a stand still after they failed to come to a deal at the end of July.

Meadows, in his interview on Wednesday morning, tried to place the onus on Democrats.

‘If we got back in the room with some of their priorities, we could cut a deal — the president wants to do that. But I’m not optimistic,’ he said. 

‘I actually had my staff reach out again yesterday to Speaker Pelosi’s chief of staff to say we haven’t heard anything from her. I don’t anticipate we’ll actually get a phone call,’ he noted. 

But Drew Hamill, a spokesperson for Pelosi, told DailyMail.com that ‘Democrats have compromised in these negotiations. We offered to come down $1 trillion if the White House would come up $1 trillion. We welcome the White House back to the negotiating table but they must meet us halfway.’ 

He also noted that on Tuesday afternoon a Meadows aide reached out to the Speaker’s staff via text asking to confirm that we had the correct number for the chief of staff but there was not mention of resuming talks