Rachel Maddow said on Tuesday that Donald Trump’s government shutdown over his border wall could be at least partly to blame for the Ethiopian Airlines crash that claimed the lives of 157 people over the weekend.
According to the MSNBC host, Trump’s shutdown delayed work on a software fix that would solve what Maddow called the “unexpected nosedive problem” on the Boeing 737 Max 8.
“You might have thought we got nothing out of [the government shutdown] as a country, but it turns out not just us but the whole world got something,” Maddow said. “We got a five-week delay in the implementation of the software that they think will solve the unexpected nosedive problem in the Boeing 737 Max 8 jets.”
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Rachel Maddow explains how Trump’s government shutdown delayed work on a software fix that could have prevented the Ethiopian Airlines crash. #ctl #p2 #maddow pic.twitter.com/UzAhQjPenO
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) March 13, 2019
Maddow said:
How soon could [the software fix] have been ready? Should it have been ready before the Ethiopia plane crash this week that killed 157 people? Well, here’s the back story on the timing of when this will be rolled out. Ready? A software fix to this particular flight control feature had been expected early in January, but discussions between the FAA and Boeing dragged on. Officials from various parts of Boeing and the FAA had differing views of how extensive the fix should be. U.S. officials also say the federal government’s recent shutdown halted work on the fix entirely for five weeks. So did everybody enjoy their 35-day government shutdown? I mean, you might have thought we got nothing out of that as a country but it turns out not just us but the whole world got something. We got a five-week delay in the implementation of the software that they think will solve the unexpected nosedive problem in the Boeing 737 max 8 jets, and in the meantime, Ethiopia Airlines flight 302 has crashed, killing more than 150 people. The investigation into that crash is now underway, closely on the heels of that other 737 max 8 crash that happened in Indonesia.
The deadly consequences of Trump’s government shutdown
The short-term consequences of Donald Trump’s government shutdown were bad enough as hundreds of thousands of workers without paychecks were struggling to feed their families or afford health care.
But it’s clear that, despite the fact that the shutdown itself ended in late January, there are long-term ramifications that continue to be felt, even if they can sometimes be hard to quantify.
In the case of the tragic Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend, some of these consequences can be deadly.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
